O Citadel Of Love
by GQSecondAct
Summary: CH. 15- Future Lit. Jess and Rory in NYC. "Dynamic heartbreak was too easy to feel."
1. Early

Early  
  
It was night, but a dark white stripe of light from the streetlamp outside passed through the dusty closed window and luminated her damp brown hair, long and straight, spread like a Chinese fan across the new brown pillowcase. Her right arm was bent over her head, white and supple, and the other lay softly across her chest, following the rise and fall of her body. His eyes moved down her slender, delicate frame, loving every imperfection. Her right leg lay straight, it's foot on the heel, and tiny, barely noticeable brown flecks were scattered across her calves as she hadn't shaved in almost a week. A bluish-green vein ran up her right thigh, contrasting with her milky white skin. The fitted black long- sleeved shirt accentuated her rounded hipbones, her small, flat stomach, the curve of her torso.  
  
Jess inhaled through his nose, sucking in the damp, musty smell of the new apartment. Actually, the apartment was nearly twice his age, but it was their first home. After several seconds of holding his breath, he slowly let the air drain through his pursed lips.  
  
The walls were a dark, rich brown, and the molding between them and the ceiling was made of beautiful old wood. The shady, warm colors made her feel safe, she had said. There were windows all over the rest of the apartment, letting in strips of moonlight in the evening and the noise and color of the city in the daytime. It made her feel happy, she said. Alive. That in itself made him feel alive.  
  
It had been so long since he had been in the city, living in an apartment. It was ironic- he had grown up here, and yet couldn't fall asleep through the noise of cars and horns and people. And she had never spent a night in New York, but was sleeping soundly, peacefully. He slowly rolled out of the bed and walked barefoot into the kitchen.  
  
The coffeepot, the first thing that had been put to use in the kitchen and the only thing as well, was dripping quietly. Jess padded softly towards it, then realized that there was nothing in the cabinets. He began to rummage through the pile of boxes in the living area, searching for the one marked DISHES.  
  
"It's early." Jess turned quickly around to see Rory leaning against the kitchen counter, her black shirt no longer bunched up, now hanging at her knees.  
  
He paused for a moment, then spoke in a raspy, tired voice. "There is no earliness quite like the earliness of a city morning in the great heat of summer, the audible heat, the visible heat, odorous and vaporous and terrible and seductive." He breathed deeply when he finished.  
  
"E.B. White," she whispered softly. He smiled at her rapid recognizing of his quote.  
  
"The Hotel of the Total Stranger," he murmured, putting a hand on her cheek and drawing it softly down to her jaw. Rory shuddered.  
  
"Why are you up?" She breathed back, smelling him. He smelled like smoke, like cedarwood, like rainy air and soap.  
  
"Couldn't sleep." He traced his thumb over her lips, tight and pink. She relaxed, and her lips loosened. From the light coming through the window, they filled with color. He ran his thumb over her bottom lip.  
  
He leaned in suddenly, pausing to feel her warm, arduous breath mix with his own, then gently rubbed his lips over hers, running a hand through her hair. The top of it was dry and soft- the bottom layers were cool and damp to his touch. He shivered.  
  
"Do you know," he whispered against her lips, "where our dishes are?" Rory giggled, pulling apart and slipping in between him and the counter. She pulled the sleeves over the tops of her hands as she began to move boxes.  
  
"Here," she said, carrying a large cardboard box over and dropping it onto the counter.  
  
Jess pried open the top, ripping the masking tape, and bent the flaps back. "Where are the glasses?"  
  
"Oh, they're on the bottom," replied Rory. She lazily tugged at the refrigerator door. It didn't open until after two or three pulls. The light from it was loud and bright, and it took her a moment to adjust. They had stopped quickly at a corner market on the way to the apartment for necessities. A lone jug of orange juice sat on the top shelf; in the fruit bin were several pears and a grapefruit, and on the side were enough condaments to feed the National Guard for a year. "Hey Jess?"  
  
"Yeah." He was carefully pulling plates and bowls from the box, searching for glasses.  
  
"When were shopping for necessary foods, I don't think we realized that you can't eat just ketchup." She laughed to herself and opened the freezer door, and all that greeted her was an empty icecube tray and a pint of vanilla ice cream.  
  
Jess sighed as he finally came upon cylindrical items wrapped in paper. Unwrapping one, he found a red clay tumbler and sighed, relieved. He turned to stare at the coffee pot- and realized he didn't drink coffee. Maybe, he thought, I'm remembering the delirium of being tired in New York. A second thought entered his mind. Or maybe, I'm remembering that I want something that tastes different.  
  
He slowly put the tumbler on the counter and came in front of her, one hand on the freezer door and the other on her upper neck, a thumb running up and down her cheekbone. Rory watched him, wide-eyed, as if they had never joined their lips; it reminded him of their first kiss and he paused to realize that it was against her refridgerator door in Stars Hollow. This made him smirk for a moment, and then he turned back to her. At the very last second, she closed her eyelids.  
  
Rory answered timidly at first, then straightened up and slung an arm over his neck, making him quiver. She ran her other hand through his thick brown hair, rubbing its texture and softness between her fingers. He sighed into her mouth- he tasted like smoke and the remnants of doublemint gum.  
  
When they finally parted, lips slightly distended, Rory ran a finger down the hollow in his throat and fanned out her fingers against his chest. "It's early," she repeated in between breaths.  
  
"There is no earliness, thought Mr. Volente, quite like the earliness of a city morning in the great heat of summer," whispered Jess throatily, his eyes speaking in a foreign tongue, one he only knew as he searched her face for something that could let him know that he was not dreaming her presence. "You've been reading that," she murmured back. She dropped her hand down and slid underneath his arms, which were propping him against the freezer door like a lean-to.  
  
Jess watched as she yawned and stretched her arms over her head in a Y shape, and seemed to drift into the bedroom. The door shut to block out the pale light of the main living area.  
  
After an hour of sitting on the only large piece of furniture not covered over in heavy plastic, a new black leather couch, Jess felt himself getting tired. He paused once more before going back to bed, to stare out through the sliding doors leading to a small balcony, to watch the sharp, bright yellow lights of the city buildings flicker on and off like fireflies, and listen to the loud, yet drolly rhythmic sound of car horns on the road. It was good to be home. 


	2. Emancipation

Emancipation  
  
Eight o'clock brought rough pangs of hunger straight to Rory's stomach, and its color and noise conveyed more of an effective waking-up than the practical old brass alarm clock ticking futilely on the floor next to the bed.  
  
"Dawkins," she growled into Jess' ear, making him moan and shift underneath the light cotton sheets. "Dawkins, go pocket me some coffee beans."  
  
She bit his earlobe playfully, but not so forceful as to wake him from his half-slumber. In a moment, Jess rolled onto his back and opened one eye, watching her in an ersatz suspicious way.  
  
"Young Oliver," he groaned hoarsely, "you were once so green. Now you demand of me the finest of London's pockets..." He leaned up with all of his morning strength and pecked her nose, making her giggle. He loved her fresh laughter, so smooth and soft for dawn.  
  
1/2 Hour Later  
  
"Coffee pot is officially broken. Oh, my dear friend. How I will miss you, Chocky." Rory stared longingly at the black pot, no coffee inside. The bright green light that was supposed to signify the pot's being on was going haywire, blinking rapidly and then slowing down and making an erratic beeping noise.  
  
Jess looked up from the Saturday morning paper, his dry lips smarting from orange juice. "Chocky?" he asked skeptically.  
  
Rory glared at him playfully. "Yes, as in Chock Full Of Nuts." As if on cue, she began to absentmindedly hum the theme song, pawing uselessly at the variety of buttons on the broken machine. In a moment's time, she was now adding words. "Chock Full Of Nuts is that heavenly coffee, heavenly coffee, heavenly coffee..."  
  
Jess closed up the paper and lay it on the counter, then drained his glass. "I am going to get you coffee." He grabbed for his keys off the front table.  
  
"Why Dawkins, how sweet! After all, only you and I know that a dearth of caffeine in my system will only cause me to go insane. I will be sent to Shadybrook Mental Institution! Just like those crazy old birds on soap operas! They just put you in a straitjacket and send you away! Dawkins, hurry! Get me my happy elixer!"  
  
Rory's voice sang down the hall. Jess smiled widely, even though she couldn't see.  
  
As he went to get a sweatshirt from the coat closet, she bounded up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist.  
  
"Thank you, John," she whispered into his ear, kissing underneath it and making him shiver a moment. He turned his head, planting a kiss softly in her hair, and opened the door as she reluctantly let him go.  
  
As he walked down the street, searching for some sort of coffee shop, Jess inhaled the warm, lazy air alive with a plethera of city smells. He smelled Indian food, gasoline, roasted peanuts, windowbox flowers, and the sharpness of air conditioner atmosphere. As he crossed the street, nearly hit by a reckless nine o'clock taxi, the overpowering scent of coffeebeans filled his nose. He found it's source- Bookers Coffee.  
  
Inside, it was cooler than the humid air of early summer and the walls were lined with bookshelves crammed with torn-up, ancient paperbacks. Jess stopped in the doorway, his eyes growing wide. He spotted a thick copy of Pride and Prejudice and knew he had hit the jackpot.  
  
"Can I help you?" asked an old man at the counter in a blue collared shirt. Jess snapped out of his wonderment and turned, clearing his throat.  
  
"Yeah, uh, can I have..." he scanned the chalkboard over the counter. "Can I have an extra-large coffee to go? Just black, please." The man nodded and Jess walked, as if in a daze, down the aisles. At the back of one row of shelves was a large green velour chair.  
  
Again, the kindly man's voice snapped him out of his stupor. "Young man?"  
  
"Oh, uh..." Jess turned and went back to the counter, fishing in his pockets for some change. He pulled out three dollars worth in dirty quarters and pushed them across the counter. Spotting a tip jar, he threw in two more quarters and took the styrofoam cup. "Thanks."  
  
Jess' excitement built as he made his way back to the apartment. But once inside the over-air conditioned apartment building, the cold filtered air numbed up his insides and he calmed down, fading back into his James Dean persona.  
  
He opened the door to see Rory waiting nervously in the kitchen, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet.  
  
"Coffee, anyone?" he called huskily, holding it out. Rory jumped at the sound of his voice.  
  
"Oh, John Dawkins, you are my savior! Ah," she moaned, grasping the warm cup and pulling off the lid. "The elixer of life." Jess smirked and sat a kitchen stool, watching her inhale the coffee as readily and eagerly as oxygen.  
  
Rory drained the cup in ten minutes and set it down triumphantly with a 'smack' on the counter. She licked her lips, and Jess moved closer. She exhaled the warm, pungent smell of coffee beans around his mouth, and he closed his eyes and sucked on her top lip, catching her off guard. After a moment, he pulled back and stared at her intently.  
  
"What?" she asked, cocking her head.  
  
"Got any plans?" he asked, pushing his fingers through her hair like a comb.  
  
"No. Whatcha got up your sleeve, Houdini?" she asked playfully, toying with his hair and running it between her slender fingers.  
  
"The sole reason we have moved here. Come with me," he said, pulling her hands from his hair and standing up. She followed him. He opened the coat closet door and yanked out another hooded sweatshirt for her, and she pushed her feet into yellow shower flipflops.  
  
"I'm excited! Is it Indian food? If it is, I'm going to be so happy, I will buy the whole place and feed all the hungry children of the world!" Rory leaned against his shoulder as he locked the apartment door.  
  
"Hold your horses, Ghandi," he smirked, putting an arm around her and shoving the keys into his pocket. "That's not the half of it." Rory squealed.  
  
Ten minutes later  
  
"Jess..." breathed Rory, staring in awe. She stood in front of the rows of bookshelves, her eyes not moving from the rows and rows of classics, pages soft and furled like feathers and covers worn and old.  
  
"The lady likes it. Huh," Jess simpered, tickling her side. She leaned the opposite way, swatting at him absentmindedly.  
  
"I'm speechless, I...they, they are books..." she pointed, "and that..." she turned and pointed at the counter in the front, "that is coffee...and they are together...same place...books...just read...read coffee books..." she stopped to catch her breath.  
  
"Rambling," Jess muttered. Rory's ears perked up.  
  
"Sorry," she apologized. "But oh my God, Jess, this is like- this is my heaven." A smile slowly broke out onto her face, and she turned and took his hand. "Come on, let's go read! Oh, wait." She fished in her pocket for something and retreived a five-dollar bill. "Get me coffee." She turned, her almost-dry hair flapping, and began to walk in awe down the rows, pausing every so often to pull out a book and read the back cover.  
  
Jess watched as she discovered the green velour chair, and fell slowly into it with The Pickwick Papers.  
  
"Her emancipation," he thought, before walking to the counter.  
  
A/N: please read and review! I appreciate it so much and will try to respond to as many as I can. I hope you guys are liking the story so far. If you have any ideas, just let me know. I'll be updating frequently, maybe once a week or more. So let me know what you think!!! M.M. 


	3. sdrawkcabbackwards

A/N: thanks for the great reviews so far! You've inspired me :-)  
  
--- AlexiaWarren --- how sweet! Thanks so much. I hope you stick around for the rest of the story!  
  
--- smile1 --- one billion thanks to YOU because I was so worried that they weren't in character. I was trying really hard to make it realistic and not just how I wanted them to be, so that's a relief! Gracias for your input.  
  
--- jlangblues891 --- muchas gracias for the nice review!!!  
  
--- Lunatic Lauren --- thanks! And just so you know, I wasn't trying to make Rory appear like she was using Jess; I thought it might add a little humor. Keep reviewing please!  
  
Two Days Later  
  
"Jess!" Rory yelled from the kitchen, standing in front of the fridge and searching the same shelves over and over to no prevail. There was now only two pears, half the jug of juice, and the same amount of condaments.  
  
Sighing heavily, she closed the door and turned to the cabinet to get a tumbler. The highlight of yesterday had been the successful quest for a new coffeepot, and this one made, she found, a surperior beeping noise when the pot had been filled to the brim.  
  
"Uhhh," moaned Jess, standing in the bedroom door perpendicular to the kitchen counter and rubbing his temples with his hand. "Jeez, Rory, what was the call of the wild for? It's 7:00."  
  
"Because, Jack, I start my new job today!" she chirped happily, draining the coffeepot and slipping it back into the machine with a resounding clang. She spun around in a white boatneck top and knee-length black pencil skirt, coming dangerously close to spilling her coffee.  
  
"Impressive," murmured Jess halfheartedly, sliding onto a kitchen stool and burying his head in his folded arms. In a moment, he jerked his head up and stared at her.  
  
"What?" she asked cynically, sipping coffee and jotting something down on a Post-It.  
  
"I...I...I missed the literary reference," he stammered, his cheeks reddening. Slowly, he felt his rebelesque morning attitude draining out of himself. He smirked particularly weakly and looked down, playing with his thumbs.  
  
"The Call Of The Wild was written by Jack London," she explained modestly, trying to suppress her giggles. He caught her cheeks turning pink and slightly swelling.  
  
"Hey," he fought back, standing up and walking around towards her, now fully awake, "it is...seven in the morning. I am not expected to be that sharp at this time. Besides," he pointed out, "it's not every day that I go head-to-head with the new editor's assistant for the New Yorker." He caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it gently towards him, softly kissing her. Her coffee-tainted breath mingled with his morning breath, quickly producing something that they both could not ignore. She pulled out first, looking at him wide-eyed, and he smiled genuinely, making him smile back.  
  
"I love you," he whispered, running a finger lazily up and down her side.  
  
"I love you too," she whispered back. Her hands reluctantly removed themselves from his hair. He wrapped his arms around her waist.  
  
"Listen," he spoke softly, "when you get home tonight, we should go down to Booker's and get some coffee, you can tell me about your day, then..." he smiled. "We can make like a dirty poem and come home." He smirked at himself and ran his lips over hers. She blushed.  
  
"Perfect." She slipped away, and he whispered 'tease' against her hair as it sped past him. Rory grabbed a light sweater and her purse, then came back and put her hands on his shoulders, kissing him gently and deeply all at once. He was taken aback, then inclined his head and ran his tongue over her lips, making an abstract sort of picture for when she was gone.  
  
He pulled out of the kiss and linked arms with her. "Come now, my dear Charley Bates, let's pocket ourselves some nice pretty things today, shall we?" he asked, leading her to the door. Rory kissed his cheek and took her keys off the table.  
  
Blushing, she muttered, "bring e. e. cummings," then slipped out the door. Jess watched her get into the elevator and leave; then he had a bowl of cereal, took a shower and got dressed, and made his way down to Booker's to spend his last day free before he started work as well.  
  
6:30 p.m.  
  
Rory sighed heavily, the clammy air around her releasing itself from her lungs. She opened the glass door of the apartment building and was greeted with a rush of icy air. She had always felt that air conditioning made the air artificial, so to speak, but the immense heat of the midday made her greatful for a man-made atmosphere.  
  
Getting into the elevator, she leaned against a bar on the wall and closed her eyes, thinking over her first day at the New Yorker. It had gone much better than she had expected; her boss was a kindly old gentleman that was intent on showing her the ropes, and she had gotten some work done and met her coworkers before stepping out to lunch. The only downside of everything had been the insanely adorable yet unbelieveably obnoxious two- year-old in the diner that she had stepped out to for lunch. She laughed a little at her former disgust and got off the elevator.  
  
As she came closer to the apartment door, she heard the faint strains of guitar music. Unlocking the door, she was met with her and Jess' stereo, playing "Lost In The Supermarket" by the Clash. With his back to her, in black cords and a red teeshirt, Jess was turning a dial on the stove.  
  
She smiled widely and threw her keys on the table, then entered the kitchen area. "Appropriate song for dinner preperations," she approved sagaciously, nodding her head and looking around. Jess turned around at the sound of her voice and smirked.  
  
Then, suddenly, Rory noticed that on a small landing behind the living room, Jess had uncovered their wedding present from Luke – a beautiful four- chair cherrywood dining table. Jess had thought it was sickeningly sweet and overrated, and they had shared a good laugh over Luke's sentiment on the honeymoon.  
  
But now, the table looked beautiful, like it was taken straight from the pages of a Home and Garden-type magazine. Two tall dark red candles sat glowing in the center, and the table was set for just two. The lights were out, and the flickering shadows of the candles, grew and shrank against the soft wooden walls.  
  
"Oh, Jess," she murmured, putting her hand on the counter to steady herself. She tentatively stepped forward to the table, and ran her hand along it.  
  
Rory could feel herself tearing up, and she knew that she was the only person that Jess would let his guard down for and give away his alter ego to. She smiled widely, and turned to face him. He was leaning against the fridge, his arms crossed and a shameful smile playing on the corners of his mouth.  
  
"I thought..." he started, then trailed off and looked up at the ceiling. "I'm a hypocrite, I know," he muttered.  
  
"Oh, Jess, you're my favorite hypocrite," she said, laughing through some tears. She came up and ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. He smoothed his outstretched palm over her back. "My softy." She giggled and he laughed a little too, then moved his hands around her waist and kissed her deeply. Rory smiled against his mouth and he trailed a few butterfly kisses down her neck. She made a small noise, and he pulled away.  
  
"Dinner first," he whispered. "I figured we skip Booker's tonight, have some fun..." he smirked and brushed a stray wispy strand of smooth brown hair behind her ear. Rory blushed.  
  
"Sounds like a plan," she said, pecking him quickly. "So, what are we having, Ms. Bedford?"  
  
"Well, Olly dear, some warm wine and water, and dry toast. And perhaps, a nice bowl of hearty broth with bread crumbs," Jess teased. "Um, I just made...sort of the only thing I could..." suddenly, oven timer beeped. Rory peered over his shoulder.  
  
"Aw, Jess," she whispered. "I knew those countless days at Luke's would prep you for independent living. But seriously, that is probably the one thing I could eat right now."  
  
"Well, go, sit." Jess motioned for her to leave. "I figured," he called, "we'd kill 2 birds with 1 stone. You know, eat something homecooked and the one thing I know how to make, and get rid of some of those condaments." Rory giggled.  
  
Jess brought out first her cheeseburger, then his, and next a bowl full of homemade french fries that were ten times as good as Caesar's.  
  
"So," he began, squirting ketchup onto his burger, "how was your day?"  
  
"Pretty good," Rory replied. "Everyone was nice, I have my own office," she squealed happily, "and my boss is a great guy. Kind of grandfatherly, I suppose. Like a nicer Taylor Doose." Jess smirked. "The only downfall was when I went to this nice little hole-in-the-wall diner for lunch, and the woman in the booth behind me had this really intolerable little kid. He was cute as a button, but I wanted to just turn around and scream!" Rory laughed a little to herself. "I've never seen hands that small," she commented. "Or so vicious. Oatmeal everywhere." Jess laughed.  
  
"That's like if in Rosemary's Baby:The Awakening, Rosemary didn't bring Adrian away from Hell." He smiled, biting into his dinner.  
  
"Yeah, that's the worst movie I've ever seen, except for that one with Madonna and Guy Ritchie," she pointed out. "But you know, I guess that's the way little kids are. Most of the time they're obnoxious, but they're so endearing. I guess they can't help it." Rory smoothed out her napkin, staring at Jess absorbedly.  
  
He looked up. "What?" he asked, a smiling threatening to break through his seemingly expressionless face.  
  
"Do you ever think about it?" she asked hazily.  
  
"Think about what."  
  
"You know...well...having kids, I guess."  
  
Jess was quick to put up his shield. "Rory, you just started your job. I do tomorrow. We just moved in, we've been married for two months. Now of all times is the worst time to..."  
  
"Jess!" Rory snapped, causing him to stop. "Jess, I didn't say 'hey, let's hop in the sack and make a little charmer of our own', okay? I asked, do you ever think about it?" Stillness ensued, and the awkward pause gave way to a drop in the conversation. Nearly ten minutes passed. Rory spoke up diffidently.  
  
"Jess."  
  
He looked up, clearing his throat. His eyes said he was sorry, but he knew that it was his turn to speak. "Listen, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have bit your head off, I..." he trailed off self-effacingly. Once again, Rory cut him off.  
  
"Jess. Please. Please answer me." He looked up, and they locked gazes. Finally, he barely nodded his head and looked down, studying the crumbs of salt on his plate.  
  
Jess awkwardly tried to busy himself, failed, and began to clear away the plates. She helped without a word, then hesitantly walked out onto the small balcony. The summer wind ripped at her face and blew her hair sideways. Car horns blared fitfully. Lights of yellow, white, green, and blue blinked on and off or burned constantly on buildings close by or so far away that they looked like floating neon stars against the orange-black sky.  
  
The clicking of the sliding door followed footsteps, and he came behind her and ran his fingers through her messed brown hair. Jess moved closer. Rory turned around slowly, and her cheeks were tearstained. She tried to explain herself, but to no prevail.  
  
"I just, I don't know why I'm...I really am sorry, it was a stupid question, I just got all crazy...It's been a long day, I guess...I, I'm sorry..." Rory bit her bottom lip, making the top one pout out, and looked down at the ground. Jess took her in his arms and she burst like a sad, winded balloon, burying her face in his shoulder. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry...I'm..." she hiccuped a little.  
  
Jess felt his shield once again slipping out of his grasp and falling down the hundreds of stories onto the streets below. Luke's ceaselessly corny warning of "honesty is the best policy," kept creeping into his head like a gnat- he kept swatting it away but it always returned and eventually won. He sucked in a great stream of air.  
  
"I..." he began, then stopped. She pulled her face away. He lost his train of thought for a moment and watched her staring at him, sorrowful and slightly confused and just overwhelmed with conflicting feelings.  
  
"What are you feeling?" he murmured.  
  
She retained a sob and sniffled, breathing in through her nose. "I just feel like...like..." she imploded. It was inevitable. "Like everything is coming at me at the wrong times..." she bit the cotton of his teeshirt shoulder, choking on tears. He gripped her tighter.  
  
"I..." once again he began. She turned her head sideways; Jess felt her hot, labored breath on his neck and shivered. "I..." he stumbled over words, falling into a giant heap of them. After much struggle, he pulled them out of the pile and lined them up neatly. Then he read.  
  
"I want that." He whispered. She slowly, cautiously looked up and a lone tear rolled down her cheek. "Rory," he continued, trying to prevent another implosion as best as he could, "I feel like you. Like our whole 'plan' of sorts is coming at me backwards. Like...like I want it now."  
  
"Jess," she breathed, searching for words. Rory was speechless in a sense; or, she thought, maybe I've fallen into my pile of words but am too tired and overwhelmed to search for the right ones. She leaned against his shoulder and her shaking slowly stopped.  
  
They stood for what seemed like forever to the rest of the world, but Jess and Rory had not held each other close like this in so long. It was as if, pardon the cliché, a huge weight had been lifted off each set of shoulders, and they could now breathe. There was no longer an immense burden straining their lungs.  
  
And so now they stood, savoring and struggling to comprehend the feeling of having laid out these truths.  
  
A/N: PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS! Please review!!! 


	4. Nimbus

A/N: Casey dear, the reference to Charley Bates is from Oliver Twist, as is that of the food in the middle of Chapter 3.

--- Lunatic Lauren --- a little confused by your last comment (the whole jessikins thing) If you get the chance, can you please clarify? Thanks so much for the nice review. Sorry, I'm a little out of it.

--- AlexiaWarren --- thank god, I thought that maybe the whole enter-the- baby-plotline thing would be a little too mundane and overused but I guess not! I know like everyone does this plotline a lot, but I thought I'd try and tweak it my way. Let me know how I'm doing. OH! And I am sending your penny express ;-)

--- TorturedMind --- THANKIES THANKIES THANKIES! By far one of the greatest reviews ever. You have inspired me! Below, my inspiration of the evening!

A/N: sorry guys, but can anyone tell me how to get anything bold or put asterixes in? It never works! Help me!!!

THE NEXT WEEKEND

Riding in a stuffy car with broken air-conditioning is not the most pleasant experience in early summer. June had decided it was bigger than its britches and peaked early; the windows were rolled down but Jess and Rory were only met with loud, warm wind slapping against their faces - anything but relief from the dry air and boiling heat.

Both were still shaken by their previous revelations the night of Rory's first day at work and the silence made it harder to bear the desiccation. As punishment for leaving the car radio on while Jess was eating lunch in the parking garage, the car no longer possessed the amperes to play the radio and so the only sound was ripping wind and cars speeding by.

About an hour and a half later, they slowed down and Rory noticed familiar places - the music store, the cake store...hell, every kind of store imaginable had been crammed into the droll and eccentric yet inexplicably charming town of Stars Hollow. Passing Doose's Market, Rory breathed in the non-polluted air and smiled. She missed this.

"My dear progeny!" squealed Lorelai, bounding off the front porch of her pale yellow Victorian. She ran up to the window on Jess' side and knocked on it obnoxiously, shrieking for him to roll it down and raise his eyebrow like a private eye. Jess rolled his eyes in response, sighing heavily and yanking the keys from the ignition. The dirty car slowed to a stop and quieted down.  
  
"Hey, Mom," called Rory, her face flushed and hair messy and windblown. She slowly removed herself from the passenger side and made her way around to her mother, who stood perkily in front of her with a grin that would have made Ronald McDonald envious.  
  
Rory perfunctorily held out her arms and Lorelai shrieked excitedly, wrapping her arms around her.  
  
"Dearest progeny, third-generation Gilmore mastermind, how have I missed thee? Let me count the ways," babbled her mother. Rory slightly smirked, pulling back to witness her mother scratch her chin and stare into the sky.  
  
Jess yanked open the car door and slammed it shut. Hoping to avoid an awkward, false-emotion-filled hug, he leaned against the side of the car and shoved his hands into his pockets. The house had not changed; it was still the same charming, slightly-out-of-place home where he had so many times peeked through the window and purposely walked past almost seven years ago. Remembering when the only things that mattered to him were books and the rare opportunities to consume alcohol made him sneer at the thought of his former self, but he didn't dwell on that for long.  
  
"And how is my chipper son-in-law? How's the inner bad boy, James Stark?"  
  
"Oh, Mom, I'm so proud. You finally watched the movie and learned his name." Rory sighed and leaned against the car next to Jess.  
  
"Calling somebody Rebel Without A Cause sounds so much more intriguing than James Stark. James Stark could be a shoe salesman at Stride Rite, for all I care. Well come on, come inside." Lorelai slipped in between them and put an arm over their shoulders, making Jess initially flinch, but soon relax. He was used to it.  
  
Jess earnestly declined Lorelai's overexcited offer to come smoke a cigarette on the back porch, and excused himself, muttering something incoherent, to go to the bathroom. Rory sighed deeply. The feel of cool air and the smell of green tea incense reminded her of a failed Spiritual Health Night long ago, when she and her mother spent a ridiculous sum of money on a small rock garden with a little waterfall that produced tropical chirping noises, and a superfluity of candles. The hackneyed yoga session had ended when Rory twisted her ankle, and when the waterfall was unplugged the toucan noise failed to cease.  
  
"So, how's the apartment? How come I haven't been invited up yet?" whined Lorelai playfully. Rory followed her into the kitchen. Lorelai began to toy with the coffeepot.  
  
"I'm sorry, it's just that Stark and I have been too lazy to unpack anything. All we have is some kitchen stuff, the couch, the table..."  
  
"Aw, Softy's table! I knew you loved it."  
  
"Yeah, it is really beautiful. But we have like nothing and the house is empty. It still has new house smell."  
  
"New house smell? Is that even a concept?" Lorelai yanked the coffeepot plug out of the wall.  
  
"Yeah, you know when everything isn't put out so it's all big and echoey and...the walls smell new..."  
  
"Didn't you previously mention that this apartment is a pretty old one? Ugh, crappers."  
  
"Mom, just go to Luke's if you're so desperate for coffee. That happened to our machine a week ago, but we bought a new one."  
  
"What color light does it have when it's on?" asked Lorelai enthusiastically, jumping up and down.  
  
"Red. Oh and the beeping noise when it's done? The perfect volume. Not too loud, not too soft. And a good pitch, I might add. Never sharp or flat. Always consistently natural." Rory giggled.  
  
"You have discovered the best coffee machine, my dear. You're lucky, you know, they're a rare species." Lorelai frowned and threw the wire of the pot around like a whip. "That's it. I'm going to Luke's. Do you want anything?"  
  
"Bring us back some fries, please." Lorelai grabbed her keys off the hook next to the back door and hopped out.  
  
Rory looked around, resting her hands against the kitchen table. She had just settled into the atmosphere of Stars Hollow; of her old house. Everything was different – in New York, the setting was demanding of attention, yet the company she shared it with was calmer, more placid. Here, the setting was muted and tranquil but the populace was the former of the two comparisons.  
  
The slightest things here were of such great importance; a failing coffeepot warranted a trip to the diner, and on the way to this destination one might encounter a quirky citizen with a pilgrim bonnet, which would make you wonder about this until you came into the sight of the Town Square and realized that the Cornucopia Festival was occurring. Thus, you would forget all about the coffee and enter the apple-bobbing contest. In New York, everything grabbed her eyes' attention, but the direct, diligent feel in the atmosphere made it impossible for her to focus her attention on it for too long.  
  
Rory wandered down the hall and stopped by her old bedroom door. Slowly pushing it open, she had an encounter with a myriad of flashbacks and a trivial sense of dejá vu. Everything had stayed the same, as if enclosed in a bubble for five years. The bookshelves were still as time, and not a one had moved from its place. Colonel Klucker was still perched dutifully on the bureau; the bedcovers pulled up and made neatly, not undone since her last night at home before moving to Yale. Curiously, she opened the closet door. Like sleeping soldiers, the Dean Box and the Jess Box rested unmoved on the floor underneath her old Chilton uniforms.  
  
Catching her attention on a shelf was a large crate. In permanent marker on the side, the crate read Books. She reached up, straining her long, limber arms, and pulled it down slowly. Sitting cross-legged on her bed, she lifted off the lid and began to sift through it.  
  
"Nancy." A moment later, Rory looked up at the sound of Jess' soft yet rough voice. She smiled a little, he smiled back. Jess walked in, giving the room a once-over.  
  
"Bill," she murmured back, placing a book onto her bed. He sat opposite her, chewing on the inside of his mouth and pursing his lips.  
  
"What's in there?" he asked.  
  
"Just some old books from when I was little." She glanced down, pulling a stack out. "You know, A.A.Milne, you've got your everyday Winnie the Pooh, The Secret Garden..." she trailed off, pausing to flip through one.  
  
Jess reached in and pulled one out. "The Time Machine?" he asked sardonically. "You were reading H.G.Wells in kindergarten?"  
  
Rory blushed. "Well, it's not like it's that long," she argued, turning one over. "Though I must say, I was quite the young erudite. Look at this, Frances Hodgson Burnett. That's a lot of symbolism for a five-year- old." Jess smiled slightly. He reached in and pulled out an average-sized off-white picture album. In Lorelai's loopy handwriting she had written Rory across the top. Rory's cheeks turned a ferocious shade of ruby and she moaned. "Please, please, everyone says the same thing." Jess just shook his head and opened the album.  
  
Inside were tens of dozens of baby pictures of Rory, dated and captioned meticulously by Lorelai. The first one was the one of her initial day home from the hospital. She lay in a crib in the guest room at the Gilmore estate, and Jess remembered that Rory had not always lived in this house. She was sound asleep, her miniature cheeks a pale crimson shade and her eyelashes long and wispy. Her hair, as if rubbed by a helium balloon one hundred times too many, stuck straight out from her head in a static brown ring.  
  
"Your hair," commented Jess, smiling slightly. Rory groaned and leaned back onto her pillow.  
  
"Everyone says that," she sighed heavily, watching him study the photo. She raised one eyebrow. "What?"  
  
He looked up, and Rory's brain recognized and prepared for the coming of a rare profession of candor. Jess steadily matched her gaze. "It's like a halo," he said bluntly. She hadn't thought it possible, but her cheeks grew redder. She looked down, and discovered a smile creeping onto her face that she didn't know about.  
  
Jess flipped through the pages, pausing slowly to look at some. There was one of Rory, only a couple of months old, with downy brown hair curling around her face and wide, luminously blue eyes. She stared intently at the camera, her soft skin wrapped in a large red quilt. At her feet lay a James Herriot treasury. Jess smiled inside his head; he should have known.  
  
A few moments more of being wistful for a time he had never shared passed, and then he closed the album carefully, running his thumb across the top. He looked up. Rory had not once shifted her gaze from his face.  
  
And so they sat, trying in two separate worlds to decipher what perhaps this moment meant; or, if there was nothing to decipher at all...  
  
Perchance, the thought that there might be nothing to decipher made each try harder to do that.  
  
Decoding a moment is like searching for a lost shoe; one tries to very hard to find it, only to later discover it was right in front of one's nose.  
  
A/N: OK, so I don't have pennies...but in exchange for your thoughts, I will give you my love!!! All you need is love, said Paul McCartney. And for my own pleasure, I quite agree...


	5. Imaginary Bubblesoap Memories

A/N: Thanks for all the love. I'm home all day today so there may be more chapters by tonight!!!  
  
--- someone5 --- Thanks for the awesome review! I'm so happy you like it.  
  
--- TorturedMind --- You are such a sweetheart! You are one of my favorite reviewers.  
  
--- Lunatic Lauren --- Thanks for clearing that up. Now I get it, and I VERY VERY MUCH agree!!!  
  
--- Regina Falangi --- I am loving your Friends name, very cool! :-D Glad you like it.  
  
"The Swan Princess," moaned Rory with dismay, watching Lorelai eagerly push the videotape into the VCR and start fooling with the remote. "This is by far the most rehashed storyline in the history of motion pictures." She folded her arms over the pillow in her lap and tucked her legs underneath herself like a rabbit. "Hey Lane."  
  
"Yes, Princess." Lane was busy making herself a cold Smores from the abundance of tooth-disintegrating candies on the coffee table. Rory groaned.  
  
"You are gonna have fun with this all night, aren't you?" Rory swatted at Lane's shoulder, making her laugh and lose her precocious balance. The carefully made Smore fell across the floor. "Oh, sorry Evil Captor, but your plan to drug me with immense amounts of sugar and vexing nicknames has been foiled." Lane giggled, reaching for her fallen chocolate bar.  
  
"Hey, Princess Hellfire, but that was for me," Lane complained lightheartedly. She picked up a marshmallow and flung it at Rory. "And too many big words." She recreated the Smores and seated herself back up on the couch next to Rory. Lorelai pressed the play button and squeezed in next to Lane.  
  
"So remind me again please, why can't I microwave this so it's a real Smores?" asked Lane halfheartedly.  
  
Rory fastforwarded through the previews. "Because my mother put a non- microwaveable plastic tub of tomato sauce in there, and the plastic melted. Thus, the tomato sauce covered the inside of the microwave. And she's too lazy to clean it up." Lane giggled slightly, Lorelai smirked, and Rory took advantage of the situation to continue fastforwarding to the middle of the movie.  
  
11:00 PM  
  
Jess slowly opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind him. Passing by the living room, he smirked upon the sight of Rory, her mother, and her best friend curled up on the couch with their eyes closed. The only sound to be heard was the soft overemotional voices of animated characters in some sort of princess film.  
  
Quietly making his way down the hall, he opened the door to Rory's room. He was greeted with the warm yellowed glow of the desk lamp. On the floor next to her bed, the crate of his wife's childhood books lay with the top leaning against it. He sat down slowly on the bed, leaned over, and reached into the box, removing the picture album.  
  
"You're back early." Jess recognized Rory's soft, floaty tone and looked up. She leaned against the door frame in an oversized Yale sweatshirt. Her hair, pushed back behind her ears, spread itself like a half-moon around her shoulders.  
  
"Guilt. My rebel days are over," he murmured sarcastically, flipping the album quickly shut.  
  
Rory smiled tiredly; and like most eleven o'clock smiles, it turned into a yawn. She clapped her sweatshirt-covered hand over her mouth and walked slowly over to him, standing between his legs. He put the album on the bed and subconsciously ran a finger over her hip and down its leg.  
  
"Why were you looking at that?" Rory hummed drowsily. Her voice, soft yet hollow from a dearth of sleep, resonated like some sort of gentle organ in his ears; like a piano made of falling snow...of bubblesoap.  
  
Jess cleared his throat, watching his finger move without knowledge of the why. "Trying to figure out what could have made your hair appear like a post-balloon rubdown," he whispered. She laughed lightly; laughter pocketed in bubbles...small bubbles because she was a quiet laughter.  
  
The unconvincing nature of his excuse warranted no explanation, she knew, although Rory mulled it over behind her mask of lethargy. Finally, she turned around and fell onto his leg. He reached a hand up, running her hair between his fingers like water between brook rocks. It was feathery around the edge of her face, a light aura, so unlike the russet fan the rest of her hair shaped into.  
  
"So, what did you fall asleep to?" he asked, deciding uneasily to forget reeling off one or two witticisms on Disney Princess fairytale feature films, or something of the like.  
  
"Ugh," she moaned, "The Swan..." Rory paused a moment to stretch her muted pink lips, yawning inaudibly and squeezing her eyes shut. Seconds later she opened her eyes and finished. "The Swan Princess."  
  
"Never heard of it," he answered bluntly, turning his head sideways to look out at the sky, a purple-black shade, speckled with white dots, like the result of an ashen chalk pencil leaning against the vast dark canvas for too long.  
  
"I used to watch it all the time." Rory studied his profile; the unshaven jaw, the lissom yet uneven appearance of the cheekbone, the crooked nose which appealed to her in some sort of romantically warped way. "You know, she has these two little animal friends, a frog and a puffin, and every time I watch it I become more and more convinced that they totally stole the idea from the Little Mermaid."  
  
Jess turned his head. "What do you mean?" he asked bluntly, studying back. The shape of her nose, the bridge steep and milky smooth, the perfect camber of her forehead, the slope of her rosewater cheeks...  
  
"Oh, well Ariel has two animal friends, Sebastian the crab and Flounder the...I suppose he's a flounder fish." Rory leaned against Jess' shoulder. "Jess, I'm tired." That which started as a whisper became less than one; the comment hung breathily in the air between utterances and mouthings...Jess thought she sounded like a small child.  
  
He cherished her voice and its short but lucid resonation upon his earlobe.  
  
"Come on, then." He carefully stood up, still running strands of hair through his fingers, disinclined to let go. He pulled the bedsheets back lazily and kicked off his sneakers one at a time. They rolled across the carpet once or twice, both landing on their sides. He slid underneath and took her hand, which was hanging limp at her side, tugging on it lightly.  
  
"Hm." Rory shifted herself, laying her head in the hollow between his arm and his chest. She felt the archetypal security that all feel when nestled under the arm of the one they love, and this fluttery, calming sensation resulted in the subtly voracious reach for the other arm. Jess smirked a little, reaching his other arm across himself and making a lattice of their fingers.  
  
On his other side lay Colonel Klucker, since moved from the dresser when Rory realized that she had missed sleeping beside the most cherished of all of her stuffed animals.  
  
Jess tried to recall the presence of a stuffed animal on his bed at any point. After stretching his mind to the limits of itself, he dismissed this scarcity of memory as forgetfulness and promised himself that he would think about it come morning.  
  
Like only James Stark he slept without sleep, a prisoner of anxiety, and confusion over the anxiety he had once not believed he possessed.  
  
...Why am I forgetting what was never there?...  
  
A/N: Review, review me do, you know I review you, I'll always review, so please...review me do!!! (I'm on a Beatles kick) 


	6. The Weight

The warm bearing of Stars Hollow made one's soul thaw slightly; returning to New York on a Sunday night was like attempting to absorb the heavy shock of an intrepid alteration in ambiance.  
  
The inside of the apartment was warm and humid; dim light leaked through the balcony doors and the old mahogany fan whirred quietly in slow, slothful circles. Everything was encompassed by gray shadows; all color was muted and drained and the night was damp and balmy. Rory made her way into the bedroom. The shades were drawn down, and everything was smothered in blackness. She reached a hand out and came in contact with the lamp on the dresser.  
  
"Don't," murmured Jess' throaty voice. He approached her slowly from behind. The worn, mesmeric sound forced every muscle in her body to pause in its doings; she held her breath insentience, waiting for his prickly breath on her neck.  
  
His hand found hers; Jess' fingers unwound her nimble ones from the tie on her bag and it fell onto the carpet. She turned around slowly, one hand up, never unlocking the other from his. Rory adjusted her gaze; she could barely make out the sharp outline of his face against the underwater pool of darkness she was swimming through.  
  
One finger reached out to run over her face; its contour told her it was his thumb and she reached up diffidently, placing her thumb over his. He stopped in his tracings and watched her spread her fingers over his, matching each one with a childlike polish that curiosity had once instilled in her senses.  
  
She closed her eyes, as did he, and tied by intangible strings, their lips found one another. There was no longer darkness, but ruptures of color, of vivacity. When one sense is lost, the others replace it. Provisional blindness is replaced with eyelids and mouths, by skin and hands, by thoughts...by doings.  
  
7:00 PM  
  
Rory sat cross-legged next to the stereo, playing with the dials and sifting through the innumerable boxes of CDs she and Jess had managed to pack and bring to the apartment. The number of albums they collectively owned was only outnumbered by the vast amounts of books already stacked in shelves and bookcases.  
  
Rory could scarcely hear the phone ring while she sorted through album after album. Turning down the volume on a Big Chill soundtrack, she noticed the perpetually strident noise of the cordless telephone and unfolded her legs. Tripping over long white sweatpants, she leaned her elbows on the kitchen counter and picked up the phone.  
  
"Hello," she snapped. After completing this necessary task, she focused her attention on the refridgerator.  
  
"Hey," Jess snapped back. "Cool it, Miss Havisham." Rory smiled, relieved that it was not a telemarketer, and pulled the pint of ice cream from the freezer. She began to search for a spoon.  
  
"I thought you weren't supposed to be home until eight tonight," she commented, ending her search for utensils.  
  
"Well, I got off early," he replied brusquely, "but I left some of my stuff at your mom's house last weekend and I need to pick it up. So..." he trailed off.  
  
"So what?"  
  
"So I won't be home until seven thirty-ish." On the other end, Jess averted his eyes from the music store window he was staring at, as if it was something he should be frightened of.  
  
"Oh, no biggie. I'm just cleaning out music."  
  
"Wait...do I hear Creedence Clearwater Revival?" he asked in a whirlwind of amusement and jadedness.  
  
"Yes you do. Bad Moon Rising."  
  
"Do we own one of their albums?" he asked. "I'll put a gun to my throat if we do." Rory giggled slightly.  
  
"I'll give you a hint. It's a movie soundtrack...um...Percy Sledge, The Vandellas, The Rascals, The Spencer Davis Group, you get the picture."  
  
"What decade?"  
  
"Early 1980s."  
  
"If it's the Big Chill, I'm going to laugh at you."  
  
"Laugh away, you rebellious hyena." She heard a cynically abrupt laugh on the other end, but could feel his smile.  
  
"Well..." he trailed off again. "7:30."  
  
"Yep." The loose moment had ended. "I love you."  
  
"I love you." Rory smiled against the phone; she loved the rough velvet sound when he spoke.  
  
"Bye." Jess hung up the phone, and got into the car, only curious in the back of his mind about why he was humming Dancing In The Street. 7:00 PM  
  
Jess rang the doorbell, his hands in his pockets. He paced back and forth on the porch, studying the knots in the wood his feet rested on. He had a strange sense of vertigo being back here so soon; on any other day he never have returned but felt strangely required to retrieve what he came for. The air seemed suspenseful; it was holding itself, refusing to move. Thus, it was stale and anxious, numbing his body. He wondered what had happened to himself.  
  
"Well, I thought I'd never see the day my son-in-law voluntarily showed up on my doorstep." Lorelai leaned against the doorframe in a black silk robe, a magazine hanging lazily from her hands. She giggled somewhat. Jess smirked.  
  
"I came to...Rory wanted me to...get...she left something here..." he trailed off. "Can I just come in?" he asked, trying to fix the train wreck of a sentence.  
  
"Sure." Lorelai left the door open and trotted back up the stairs, leaving him on the porch. He stepped inside and made his way down the hallway, stopping at Rory's room. The lights were out, and the bed had been made dutifully by its owner the Sunday morning they woke up there. Jess opened the closet door, and tentatively reached out to finger a blue and black plaid skirt, a memory of Stars Hollow Rory.  
  
The box was heavy, and smelled like Rory – fresh, sweet soap and something between lilacs and the yellowed pages of a book. Old but new; naive but worldly. His mind tugged at his heart, for help in rationalizing his presence in her room, but his heart, in denial and more stubborn than his being could ever hope to be, just tugged back. This was rationalization enough.  
  
It was 7:25 when he pulled into the parking garage, lit with harsh flourescent lighting. Jess had long ago decided that he should like to be either destined for rapture or the lair of Satan, for pergatory must be much like a parking garage  
  
After becoming aquainted with several works, Jess decided that he was a combination of Rabbit and Tigger.  
  
His mind raced back to the memory of Saturday night, lying uncomforably next to Rory and racking his brain for an image of a childhood toy. That space had been void of any memory, any reminiscence. He began to search again, attempting to connect random memories together to produce a new image.  
  
He closed his eyes in anguish and discontent. Then why, he asked himself, returning to the decision of his storybook binary, do I keep returning to Piglet?  
  
A/N: More reviews set to the Beatles! "review me if you can I'm feeling down, and I do appreciate your being round, review me to get my feet back on the ground, won't you please review me..." 


	7. Unvoiced Compositions of Many Sorts

A/N: sorry if those last two chapters weren't up to par; I haven't really been concentrating because I've been waiting for my GPA to come in the mail. How come schools can't give it to you on the last day? All it does is make you wait and be incredibly anxious for another week or so. :groan: Well, I got it so now I can sleep peacefully at night and think about other things besides that. So here's a new chapter, there may be more!  
  
--- TorturedMind --- mucho love to you, my dear friend! You're always so sweet.  
  
--- Lunatic Lauren --- yeah, when Jess went to get the box it was the one with the childrens' books and the photo album. Gracias for consistently reviewing, it helps a lot.  
  
--- sarahl --- I just have the R rating for a precaution in case I decide to add anything; when it's complete if it still doesn't have any offensive material I will put it on the PG-13 page. Thanks for letting me know!  
  
ONE WEEK LATER  
  
"This is the last of the boxes." Rory picked up one of five lone boxes resting in the center of the floor. It was nearing sunset, and an orange- pink haze seemed to melt through the balcony doors, darkening the walls and melding the colors of the carpet and the wooden floor together like warm sorbet. Jess stood with his nose barely touching the glass doors, his silhouette tall and yellow against the wood.  
  
"What's in those," he asked sedately. It was less of a question and more of a comment, a conversation juxtaposition. The beer bottle hanging precariously between his thumb and ring finger swung back and forth, making a light swishing noise. For a split second, Rory thought the noise reminded her of the river underneath that bridge...she soon dismissed the thought. But it was nice to link something of the city with the bridge so far away.  
  
"Oh, just more books...yeah, books, music, knick-knacks, that sort of thing. I'm thinking we can..." she paused a moment as she moved into the empty room they were going to use as an office or study. A lofty echo came floating back to Jess' ears as her excitement built about finishing the room. "I'm thinking we can get some new chairs or something, you know, make it like a Booker's in our own home..." suddenly, the cheerful babbling ceased.  
  
Jess glanced over in the direction of the room's door. Rory stood facing the corner, just staring, bemused.  
  
"Ror..."  
  
"Jess." The interruption was distinct, crisp, abrupt. He heard her breathe in, then out, quickly; too swift to be a sigh, but too protracted to be a shudder. He knew.  
  
"Shit." He let his forehead fall against the glass; it was a summer when the air was dead, the vitality in it dying, and even the expected coolness of this surface tricked him, manipulated his senses. He attempted to breathe cold air, but there was none. The atmosphere was void of relief. He was fixed. This place, of many sides, was inexorable.  
  
Rory bent down slowly, squatting in front of the box, lifting its lid. The contents were familiar, of course, and the album was resting on top of the stacks of books. She picked it up vigilantly like a glass bird, tracing circles in the web of silvery dust covering the top. An instinct, she turned around to face her husband, album still held with both hands like an explanation, a union, a string between two assumptions. Her mouth felt dry, drier than the outside, drier than the scarce patches of grass scattered throughout the city. She swallowed, and no relief came. No satiation, no coolness.  
  
Much like dry glass in a dead summer.  
  
Swallowing would not elucidate something that seemed to be clear already. But she knew what came with assumptions. Assumptions had gotten her here, in a twisted sort of manner. And she feared they would get her out as well.  
  
"I don't...I didn't bring them...why did you...why did you?" She swallowed hard this time, unthinkingly, knowing that it wouldn't relieve the aridity. How dry it was. How choked; how hazy.  
  
He cleared his throat, did not face her, but averted his eyes so hers could see he would answer. His voice felt suffocated, like a dying life, and he struggled to revive it. Initially, nothing came, but he lifted his face off the glass and came back into reality. He no longer sat on the line between sanity and truth. Insanity, he thought, is not what this is. I am confusing it with what I really do want.  
  
"I was..." he paused a moment. He could see pink in her eyes, a sharp, orangy pink, a crying pink. There was no stopper, so he continued shakily. "I thought we were, you know, you said, and..."  
  
"Yeah." She cut him off. The pink was glassy, wet. Rory looked down at the album in her hands. "Did it make you..."  
  
"Think?" the interruption was returned.  
  
Rory nodded shakily, looking away, watching the shifting light dance on an empty wall. Dancing...that's what I want to do. Not this.  
  
Jess turned around, stopped leaning, stopped being the insurgent. It had been here too long now; it needed a rest. "It made me think," he stated frankly. She looked up, her head darting, searching his eyes meticulously for a continuation. She looked hopeful and cynical both...was it possible?  
  
"Rory, I..." he cleared his throat, but the roughness, the throatily velvet sound returned nontheless. "Are we..." the insurgent was stronger than the Jess, and clotheslined the sentence he had known in his heart would never make it out.  
  
But she finished for him, pulling his feelings out onto the floor and spreading them out for her to see. "...trying?" She gently put the album down on an end table, and watched it as though it was going to move.  
  
He didn't move, speak, nod, but she knew. They both knew.  
  
Minutes passed; the room grew darker: less pink now, more golden, more brown.  
  
"Will you dance with me?" It was sudden, but still floaty; still like bubblesoap sound.  
  
He nodded, and approached slowly, as if neither knew the other, as if the aforementioned was a figure of the imagination; a nonexistent.  
  
Dancing to silence is the best kind of dance; you create the music, the rhythm, the mood, and everyone, everyplace, everything else is your dance partner, moving with you, breathing with you, feeling how you feel.  
  
"Yes," he whispered in her ear. The question answered late is ever so surperior to the question left hanging in the dead air of summer.  
  
A/N: SIMPLY REVIEW; I AM WRITING THIS WAY TOO LATE TO PLUG "REVIEW" INTO A BEATLES SONG...MUCH LOVE 3 


	8. On Mars Tonight

A/N: I am allowed to boast that I have the best reviewers ever! You are all so wonderful and I love you all.  
  
--- TorturedMind --- I literally wait for your reviews when I post a new chapter! You are so wonderful and...I love you :smooch:  
  
--- Anastasia Athene --- Go Beatles!; I have plugged "review" into a Beatles song at my end-of-chapter author's note just for you. Thanks for the great review.  
  
--- smile1 --- "Black And White" was...I'm speechless. I have reviewed it, and I am flattered that you think so highly of my opinion :-D Thank you ten billion times! It's officially on my Favorites list.  
  
Regina Falangi, Lunatic Lauren, sarahl: thanks for always letting me know how my chapters were! If you have any criticisms, please let me know and I will try my best to improve. So, here's another update!  
  
...................................................................................................................................................................................................  
  
There was something personal, familiar about subway cars that made Rory contented, and although she couldn't quite put her finger on it exactly, she assumed the warmed feeling had something to do with the smell, or the lighting, or the notion that all who ride the subway leave a bit of themselves behind.  
  
She was acquainted with the sentiment; it was much like the one she was filled with when still laying in bed at twelve o'clock. Wrapped in blankets, warm and sheltered and closed out from the world, there was a certain security, predictability, romance of it. Inside a snowglobe music box, you are encompassed only by luminous tinted glass and falling white drops, secluded and blissful and only knowing of what is to come...and that what is to come is something you look forward to. This, she thought, this sleeping-at-noon feeling, this subway-car feeling, is much like what living in a snowglobe must be like.  
  
And, she added on to her cerebral treatise, this happy snowglobe sensation can only be improved upon by the addition of company. Today she smiled, for this company was that of a friend.  
  
"You are so right." Lane's eyes moved like the scrupulous hand of a teacher washing each and every molecule on a chalkboard clean, making sure she didn't miss anything. The subway was deafeningly loud today; businessmen and women were seemingly teeming out of the car, spilling over its windows and onto the tracks.  
  
The rapid clickiterikitica of the swift metal wheels rolling and swerving over the tracks produced a background noise so raucous that Rory was forced to strain her ears to hear; she swore that she could feel each lobe stir unnervingly. "What?"  
  
"It's like a bubble...okay, so that's pretty cliché, but the car is just like this, this..." She closed her eyes, shaking her head. Thick, layered, ink- black hair darted back and forth like a faulty windmill. "Hey!" she exclaimed, imploding with animation. "It's like in The Wizard Of Oz, where Glenda floats through the sky in a pink happy bubble, and she's just so warm and idyllic while everything outside isn't necessarily a picnic." Lane laughed at herself, leaning her head against the window.  
  
Rory grinned, picturing a subway car floating through the vivid scarlet poppy meadows of Oz. She shook her head in imitation of Lane, but for a far removed reason. Inexplicably, she wondered why it seemed as though she was the subway car, and the meadow was her reality. Her mood was so heightened by her and Jess' new decision that she had failed to think of the ramifications.  
  
What if, she thought, we are jumping into this pool of intransience without knowing the actuality of it, the consequences? What if I am fretting over this, trying to turn my happiness into disappointment because I don't want to keep my hopes up?  
  
8:30 PM  
  
Work removed Jess from real life and transported him to a Robinson Crusoe- type situation, however instead of a companionship with humanity, he was tied to the earth of prose for eleven hours. Being stranded on an island of literary works was paradoxical to him; he reveled in the loneliness and freedom of a forest of bookcases and pencils and newspapers. Putting judgment onto paper was freedom in itself; being compensated for personal opinion was so detached from reality it was incomprehensible to him. He had decided that writing editorials was the sort of thing that made him the happiest, only surpassed by Rory.  
  
Now, standing at the door to the apartment, key in hand...now was the moment when he finally let everything sink in; he soaked it up apprehensively, not sure he wanted to delve into the feelings, the veracity of it all. It surprised him that the many revealings of the past night, although masked by quietness and trepidation and reluctant honesty, made him feel good. It was something he had not felt in a long time, and there was a refreshing aspect to this new emotion that bewildered him and relieved him at the same time.  
  
Was he happy? Archetypal Jess, naturally, did not want to acknowledge it, but the minute twinge in his heart as he turned the key in the lock told him that this assumed feeling was confirmatory. Elation was something foreign to his guise, a language he was rarely known to grasp. Although unfamiliar with this, his head told him that he would learn to grow comfortable with it.  
  
Stepping inside, he expected to hear a characteristic Rory noise, one of many he had come to know well – perhaps the incessant beeping of a coffeepot left ignored, the laughtrack of a Donna Reed show, the incommodious beat of My Nutmeg Phantasy.  
  
All that greeted him was the deep blue emptiness of a home wanting of light. The soft buzz of a lightbulb was absent; the hazy glow of a multifaceted lampshade missing. Raising an eyebrow at his false assumption, he threw his keys idly onto the glass table sitting near the door, making a harsh scraping noise.  
  
Shoving his hands into his pockets, a reflex of sorts, he tripped down the steps into the living room and stopped short, nearly spinning around and returning in the other direction. Rory was sitting on the couch, her body curled and being slowly swallowed by the vast expanse of black cushion. Her elbows resting on her knees, her face was buried in her palms. Jess was reminded of Anna Karenina, then cursed himself for thinking an irrelevant thought when he was faced with a discomfited situation.  
  
Jess breathed the air; it smelled musty, broken in. Something had broken in the air and he was at a loss for what it was.  
  
"Rory." His voice, concerned but shrouded by indifference, slowly melted into her ears. Rory took a moment to absorb its easiness, its raspy silkiness. She removed her face from her hands; they had slowly molded into the shape of her appearance, and were balmy and moist with old tears...useless tears. Now they seemed useless. Moments beforehand they were justified. Now, these tears had no case.  
  
She looked up. His face, hardened and emotionless, was softened by his eyes, pools reflecting the Jess buried beneath the layers and layers of façades and walls. Her face was splashed with wet lines, like dried up rivers...useless rivers. Swollen lips of ginger and dilute irises exploding with the sadness that is cornflower blue controlled his eyes.  
  
"Why are you...did you forget where the light switches were?" he asked. A first: sarcasm failed to loosen the tight ropes surrounding him. Jess, itching for something to do, poked his fingers through the top of the lampshade on the end table and turned on the lamp.  
  
White fire fuzz softened the room, blending with the gray ceiling and soaking up the tangible monotony. Though, the bleakness which cannot be touched remained.  
  
Jess sat tentatively. It stupefied them both that although tied by the bonds of holy matrimony, neither had become skilled at openly addressing negativity; small quarrels became forgotten quagmires. Characteristically one who was bothered easily, this drew the smoke from the fire and Jess cowered at the pungency of its odor.  
  
"Why are you upset?" he asked candidly, formulating this sentence at the measured pace of a naïve child. Biting your tongue makes the blood fall, after all.  
  
Rory shifted, staring through the window at the angular blackness along the skyline as though unaware of his presence. He shifted in return, leaning back and letting the cushion swallow him as well. Ineffectually tucking a feathery piece of hair, curled haphazardly at the end, behind her ear, she sighed as it fell from behind it and contrasted itself with her skin, a white moon shade melded with rosewater and peach sunrise.  
  
"I thought..." he turned, learning every inch of her. There were miles to every inch of her face, and the catch in her throat, the dying, stifled heart on her tongue groped for him. So he listened.  
  
"I was...I thought about all the reasons why not to try, and why it might be bad, and if it never happened, and I...Jess, I wrote them down..." Rory shook her head slightly as a tear ran down her jaw. He touched it; his finger was warm now, warm on her skin. His hand moved up her face to her hair. Jess ran his hand down the layers as if it were the first time. Hands made her melt...an hour to every second as she dripped, falling into a warmed, heartrending puddle upon his shoulder.  
  
"...I wrote them down, and there were so many, and I just thought 'this doesn't make any sense.' Because there's so many more little reasons for why to try, and they seem so much less consequential, but I like them...I like them better. I...I just want to, and it feels right, but the bad things, there's so many."  
  
Rory shivered, and pulled herself lithely out of his arms, tucking her own around herself and shoving her chin into her collarbone. The night was darker now; the white blurry haze of the light was more noticeable.  
  
"Rory." He stood up, the mechanical transition of hands to pockets occurred. Deciding he needed one, a right hand was removed and he reached out, opening it. A sense of knowingness was extended with it.  
  
Rory had always liked his hands – calloused, protective workers, holders of cigarettes and menders of torn book bindings. Now she took one in her own, feeling it run over her smaller one. Although different in size, in shade, in age...both were equally articulate. Hands are words at the right time of day.  
  
Outside, the air was more tumultuous than the previous night; less dead and more whipping, crisp. It was a black night, with streaks of bluish violet, slits in the barely discernible clouds. Standing side by side, their hands intertwined in the middle like a feathered but sturdy rope, Rory imagined that from behind they must look a lot like one of those paintings made up of millions of brilliant dots.  
  
This was nice, she decided. It made her mind surer of things.  
  
"The earth, already far off its course, swung wide and loose into the firmament, hit a fixed star, and went up in brilliant flame." His throat needed no clearing now, just an interpretation of the author's prose. Rory watched his lips move, listened to the words echoing inside of her...and answered.  
  
"The light was noticed on Mars, where it brought a moment of pleasure to young lovers; for on Mars it is the custom to kiss one's beloved when a star falls." Jess curled his lips at her finishing of his quote.  
  
Rory brushed her lips slowly over his, a remembrance for the next one thousand years...he slowly kissed her, taking in her warmth and absorbing the sadness encasing her smile, then kissed away her tears, lips so barely touching the cool skin as to moisten with salty water and stimulate a pleasurable response from she who wears the skin. "Crack Of Doom," he whispered against her, lighting a smile in return.  
  
She kissed him back, cooler breath intermingled with the heated press of lips, and shy wanderers known as tongues. Her hands discovered his hair and a hand of his. Making a net of their fingers, he lifted their arms up, resting the back of her hand on his shoulder and bringing her into his space. The only space she ever had wanted to reexplore, rediscover, rememorize, relearn. His hands found her hipbones, hidden beneath light black linen but steady, curved to his thumbs.  
  
A dog-eared patio chair sat in loneliness in the corner of the balcony, and so he sat, and pulled their lips apart reluctantly. Rory fell between his legs, her back to his chest, her head resting in the curve of his shoulder.  
  
She began this time.  
  
"Hold a baby to your ear, as you would a shell..." she turned her head, staring up at his eyes. He looked back down at her, absentmindedly taking a hand of hers in his, clearing his throat out of habit...a strange but comforting sound.  
  
"Sounds of centuries you hear new centuries foretell." Moments passed as he waited for her to speak again. Postponing the inevitable is impossible when reciting a poem such as this.  
  
"Who can break a baby's code? And which is the older –"  
  
"The listener of his small load? The held or the holder?" Jess never once moved his eyes from her own, although she moved hers, turned from his at random moments for the pleasure of knowing that, for a spell, she could run and not be caught.  
  
"Conch," she mouthed back, fixing her gaze finally, interlocking her eyes with his. Eyes, much like hands, speak for the mouth sometimes.  
  
"You know," he began, watching her, waiting for her ears to speak as well, to join the eyes and hands and mouth. They seemed eager. "The over- organized, list-and-chart-obsessed Rory will never hold as much power as the heart," he whispered. One hand made its way over her shoulder, down to where he could hear her heart beating, talking to him in a muffled but eerily clear tongue, lucid as daybreak...he had never been one for linguistics, but Jess could understand well this language, this speech, this portrayable emotion. Although he regretted sincerely what he had previously said, something told him she was not about to tease him for the singular moment of sentimental profession.  
  
Rory, fingers tentative, reached up and put her hand over his. He relaxed beneath the warmness it emitted, fingers sighing, hand breathing now.  
  
"I freaked out," she said slowly, voice an uncharted chord, string of lofty pink notes. "I just thought that maybe it was too soon and we were just jumping into it, or that we could both be preparing for some sort of heartbreak."  
  
His breathing relaxed itself now too, a preparation for words. "Rory, you want this." It was blunt, and its truth closed her eyes, made her start to apprehend the other truth...the truth of her heart's power. It was strong now, she knew.  
  
"Rory, I want this." Again blunt, but just as honest. An honesty she felt too.  
  
"Jess, are we..." Rory straightened herself up, looking at him, eyes wide...eyes pleading for an affirmative. "I really want a baby."  
  
Jess found himself smiling, even though his muscles were taut and he had promised himself not to. The idea...he remembered the poem, the word baby...a nice word. A good word. "That's a collective want," he replied. She smiled back, an unspoken music.  
  
"Jess...now."  
  
In some kinds of languages, a kiss means yes. A kiss that means something? That would mean yes threefold. So he kissed her, and it meant something.  
  
A/N: IMPORTANT! If the underline thing didn't work, two things: The words 'Conch' and 'Crack of Doom' in the story, those are the names of the poems that the characters are saying. They say them after recognizing/repeating them...you catch my drift. If the underlines didn't work, somebody please let me know how to get them on! Thank you!  
  
A/N: "Yesterday/all my reviews seemed so far away/now it looks as though they're here to stay/oh I believe in yesterday/Suddenly/I see half the reviews I used to see/there's a shadow hanging over me/Oh reviews/come suddenly..." REVIEW, POR FAVOR! 


	9. Mandolin Articulation

A/N: Thank you for the reviews; you all make my day! I had a little laughing-happy fit when I saw how much you enjoyed it, because it took me, like, forever. As a result of my having no life of real significance or importance, I spend days at a time going over and switching around parts to this story...so I'm glad it's appreciated :blows kisses: Here's Chapter...I think it's Nine.  
  
--- Anastasia Athene --- I'm very glad you liked the "Yesterday" author's note. It doesn't make much sense though...oh well. At the bottom you will find my meager attempt at 'review' plugged into Paperback Writer. Oh, and thanks for one of the nicest reviews ever. :-D  
  
--- Shouhei / TorturedMind --- I love you, I love you, you are the greatest...and I love you! My dear, thanks a trillion times over!  
  
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In many typical movies featuring a New York locale, one watches the opening credits while the background shows the view through entrancingly slow binoculars far above the city. The binoculars show the view of this monstrously large apple from the eye of a swooping pidgeon, and one's mind might be, for a moment, trying to remember if pidgeons really flutter about aimlessly rather than fly, but the mind always returns to the midday scene of the tops of buildings. Each top of each right prism seems cut from a cookie cutter or slid from a square-shaped tube, gray and thick and long. But they are not circles or spheres or cylindrical buildings; these buildings are angled. Most lessons teach one that circles are infinitive, never ending. But, much like the quadrangle frames they are built from, these buildings are only temporary. This causes one to wonder about love, among other things, such as: Is love never-ending. As a result of watching the opening credits of a motion picture, it is safe to say that what follows the credits and continues for the next 120 minutes is mindless entertainment compared to the thoughts provoked and brought to the surface beforehand.  
  
Are our hearts spherical? Sometimes, they know so...sometimes, they hope so.  
  
A WEEK LATER – 8:00 PM  
  
"...His heart in me keeps him and me in one, My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides: He loves my heart, for once it was his own, I cherish his because in me it bides: My true-love hath my heart, and I have his."  
  
Her voice drifted with unbeknownst willingness towards him, and Jess followed it with all of the physical strength he could gather at this time in the day. Today was a lingering daylight, made even longer by his personal conviction that times of consciousness were stretched like starry outbursts when he was to meet her; explosions sprinkled with fire and stars millions of miles from here, he thought, must go on for nearly forever because even we can see them. Today in particular, the time before seeing Rory was taunting him visciously, hanging precariously on the cliff of waiting but never quite falling off all of the way. And as hard as he tried, his strength was no match for the extreme patience of time.  
  
Murphy's Law did not favor him, he decided. Neither does time, and they go hand in hand. To continue, he also decided that the Law and Time, being such good friends, were bound to cause him some meaningless but very aggravating trouble for the rest of his natural life.  
  
"Sir John Philip Sidney," he whispered. Whispers did him no good...still hoarse velvet.  
  
Rory looked up from the tattered green chair. The old man who ran Booker's had not even noticed her entry, and would probably settle on closing up the shop early. Initially, she thought that she should make her presence known, but then figured that it would be fun to be locked up in an informal library of the oldest classics in world literature all night long. She smiled.  
  
Something in Jess' aura pulled at Rory like a magnet each time she was near him, and it never stopped. His force on her and her's on him was much unlike a magnet. When magnets turn they detach, for they have positive and negative sides. But she liked Jess' back, and he liked hers, and they were mutually drawn. And also unlike a magnet, Rory found herself inexplainably attracted to his negatives and imperfections, like a twisted form of reverse psychology on herself.  
  
Today, the force was almost unavoidable, much like sunrise and sunset and orange harvest moons in October. All inevitable, but a good inevitable, because they appeal to all who see and feel them.  
  
And so they left. Rory trailed along next to him keenly, an arm hanging around his neck, a broken but trustworthy necklace. She kissed his neck feverishly, making him shake. It was the middle of July, and July was a seductive and heated siren, but this heat was something he could not cool down, neutralize. It was invincible heat, controlling heat... "the great heat of summer, the audible heat, the visible heat, odorous and vaporous and terrible and seductive."  
  
This is what Mr. Volente was missing, Jess thought, as they reeled breathlessly through the apartment door. This terrible and seductive heat. He found new meaning in the Hotel as her distended ginger lips brushed edgily upon the coarse, unshaven skin of his upper neck. New meaning made him feel accomplished, gave him closure...so he could move on to other things. Things like ginger lips, and cheeks of milk, and collar bone skin that smelled of white tea.  
  
Things that smelled good, that tasted good...that spoke to him. Speaking without words is a far superior conversation...when the words have scent, have feel, have a languid manner of whispering and shouting and repeating in a darkened, humid room cut off from the world. Isolated conversation reveals more. Words that ooze and float and vibrate and crackle like a blazing winter fireplace and drift like a routinely languorous summer bay...  
  
He felt the roundness of a cheek, reddened like an early apple, but warm as a late daybreak, a vibrance in each pore, each centimeter of skin. Making contact was an sardonic type of task, simple but increasingly difficult as famine and exhaustion race.  
  
Hand to cheek...  
  
...to neck.  
  
Hand to shoulder...  
  
To arm.  
  
To waist.  
  
To hip.  
  
To thigh.  
  
Feet and legs, the most discomfited but most terse and determined of all the body's declarations, wrapped like vines of ivy, running up and down the other terrace, searching with inquisitive leaf feet.  
  
Her hands ran up and down his sides, skin to skin, sweat to skin, sweat to sweat. They searched, and found, within seconds, and began yet another of inifinite voyages, searching and traveling and finally discovering. His hair, a thick forest, a deep woods, persuaded her fingers like a trance- inducing instrument, a silent woodwind. Rory thought that his hair was more of a French horn than a flute...it was deep, thick, seductive...not small or high or thin and clear, but deep and low, a bodily concierto.  
  
He encountered her body in awe, each shape, contour, each his hand to make a mold of, to attempt to memorize. Each meeting with her physique brought a new list of facts, of theories, of postulates, of diagrams, of charts...of explanations and rules. But not one could be proven or confirmed, for the next discovery would throw everything off course into uncharted territories, refusing to float in an ocean of contradictions and breakthroughs and.........beautiful.........  
  
EARLY MORNING  
  
Both lay sleeping on top of sheets, the day still hiding behind the black suede curtain of mock night, of dark sky.  
  
"Dawn came at last, so slowly and dimly that it seemed merely an extension of the lingering night..."  
  
A/N: Ready, here goes! (It's a totally lame one, I know, but come on, I'm sleepy! :Yawn:) DEAR SIR OR MADAM/WILL YOU READ MY REVIEW/IT TOOK ME MINUTES TO WRITE/WILL YOU TAKE A LOOK/IT'S BASED ON A STORY BY A MAN (WOMAN :-D) NAMED GQSECONDACT/AND I NEED AN UPDATE/SO I WANT TO BE A REVIEW WRITER/REVIEW WRITER Okay, going to bed now! But seriously, please review! I know this was just fluff but I promise...more plot advancement and angsty romance next time!!! Much love to all... 


	10. Rope Whirlwind's Eye

orgieA/N: Okay, here goes Chapter 10! One hundred thanks go to all of you who review; as I have said, they are my "natural high" and I love to get them! They really help me improve and motivate me to write more, and I appreciate your thoughts/comments/suggestions/etc. I will try to advance the plot line a little more now; the last chapter was basically fluff and written late at night so it wasn't as good as the other ones, I think. Thank you again, Sara! I love you. AND: smile1, sarahl, Shouhei, thank you for consistently reviewing. I will try to make this chapter longer and better!  
  
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TWO MONTHS LATER; EARLY SEPTEMBER  
  
Rory sat inaudibly outside of Jess' work building on an elderly wooden bench, slightly damp and worn with age. It's olive armrests, rough and cold, were rusted on the round sloping end, like frozen burgundy fuzz. She ran a finger over the rust aimlessly, feeling it softly sand the small, flat pads of her fingers. It helped her think...she decided that she liked rust, and that its crimson corrosion of the metallic armrest was a nice September color. Pulling her thumb away, she studied the miniscule white flaps of skin torn by the small gaps in the tarnished patch, like slivers slightly deeper than her skin. She felt deep this late afternoon. So did Sylvia Plath, for her rereading of The Bell Jar was a much more enjoyable experience than the first time.  
  
"Esther." Rory recognized the silken rough resonance of his presence and closed the feathered paperback with one hand, pressing down on her thumb, still sore from the bench and holding the yellow-orange page she was now subconsciously engrossed in...multitasking.  
  
"Hey," she replied, closing her eyes for a few moments and smiling knowingly. A reddish leaf fell from a small maple tree in a plot on the sandy-hued sidewalk, rough like his persona, but substansial...needed. She opened her eyes and watched him watch her, a camera immortalizing itself. "I have never been to an asylum, nor for my health or the health of another."  
  
He was amused. "But I, Buddy Willard, just might make you crazy." He moved closer, reaching his canvas-clad toe out to nuzzle her shoe. She pulled hers back underneath the bench.  
  
"I never liked him one bit," she murmured, trying to sound apt or polished. The words spewed out awkwardly and she giggled at her calamity, looking away. Another leaf fell, and she studied its veins, the life they once gave through thin black pipelines on a field of green.  
  
"Nobody does." Jess' answer was terse now, and his gaze wintry, more sharp. The colors were less blended now, not as much submerged in shallow lukewarm pools of denial and bliss. She could see the ruddiness, and the cerulean, and the hint of glass bottle green glowing like a foggy flourescent sign in the background of this painting.  
  
She witnessed the pallet in his eyes, and she thought of the precedent and felt a chill of sharp shades. "Jess."  
  
"Hm?" his response was too quick, too well rehearsed, too practiced, too vividly multihued.  
  
He had hidden the pallet, thinking she wouldn't notice, and this action connected itself with a mental image of Buddy Willard. I never liked him one bit. "Jess..." It was a long pause, a connecting pause. Finiding the right words was always an arduous task for her, however fluent she could be; finding the right pedal to accelerate was exhausting. Finally. "There's...your eyes." Her mouth collasped. She knew that the difficult task of breaking through his shell of denial was up ahead, and she didn't want to spoil the last days of the leaves, so crimsonly close to death. But September was early and there were twenty-six more days to witness these glossy thin lives pass on, so she cleared her throat.  
  
Jess had been staring at her impassively, trying to translate the fragment, and was internally relieved when she spoke up again. He heard bubbles again...they were richer and lower and thicker than summer's effervescent sound, but just as worried. "Jess, you're upset and you're not telling me."  
  
He grunted emptily, kicking the sidewalk. A fuzzy pang bounced from the rubber of his shoe and into his toe, but he ignored it. "Shit."  
  
"Jess," she moaned back, standing up. Rory smoothed a hand over her shirt, a floaty white material she now thought was not warm enough for the crispness of the brink of autumn. Droplets of cold reverberated on her stomach and shoulders, and she winced as a brisk breeze whipped by, beginning the slow descent of existence as another leaf was caused to snap and fall.  
  
"I lost my job," he snapped, an indifference of calamitous scope rolling lazily off his tongue and hanging, a cogent icicle, in the space between them.  
  
Rory's initial thought was to gasp or to ask why in a hurried fashion, falling all over him, but the shell looked to uncomfortable to embrace now, in this cold wind. There was needless shame bouncing off of the shield he was holding up, but small streams were seeping between the cracks and his face was red. She knew better than to point this out; there would be denial and excuses of the weather's consequences.  
  
"Oh," she replied, looking around for something to study. She never could study things like he could; her brain was too busy bothering and contradicting. He was busy perfecting the art now, gazing, an empty stream of wispy ashen smoke bursting from his eyes.  
  
He was like the eye of a hurricane, "very still and very empty," and Rory's mind could not help but slip back into the memories of the past, of the same look, the same hollow cyclone. Her logical, refuting thoughts pried apart those of misconstruence.  
  
"I...I got a test. Today, I mean, I bought one." She shifted from one foot to the other. Her attempts were starting to feel like the core of a tornado, useless, ineffective.  
  
Jess looked up. His previous ennui for all things of tangibility within a three-mile radius melted like early spring snow, a puddle of wet gray ice ringed with bitter thawed water. He turned, eyes no longer emitting smoke, no longer red and cobalt and glass bottle green. Rory thought she could see pale auburn, bright yellow. His sheild was always becoming heavier, harder to hold up.  
  
"Oh," he replied shortly, eyebrows raised, bottom lip pouting out, studying his shoes. Much like the sheild, his smirk of ignorance was becoming increasingly difficult to show.  
  
"Yeah." She smiled a small smile, an unsure smile. She knew he was happy, but did not know if she should call him on it.  
  
"That's..." he paused, playing picky with the words. He licked his lips; wind made them dry, stiffened the cracks, the small scar on the top one. "It's good, you're happy..." he trailed off.  
  
Rory could feel crimson in her eyes, a sharp, fierce redness. His unsure frontage, this false fascia, it ripped at her confidence, her sureness that this was something good. Jess had never been one to express himself, keeping a tight knot on his mouth, but she could not help but wonder how age had only worsened that habit. Twenty-seven...that was too colossal of a figure to dissipate on silence.  
  
"Jess!" she barked, a fragile but angry terrier. She whirled around, catching him pulling at a leaf, ripping along the seam that was its central vein. He looked up, studying her face, furrowing his brow and smirking.  
  
"What?" It was confused, unaware. This concept in itself caused a flow of deep, rich cobalt to her irises that he took note of...belatedly. Too late.  
  
"Jesus, how long are you going to be like this? Are you going to take your causeless rebel to the grave? This is something I thought you wanted. But I keep doing the same exact thing, don't I? I keep driving over the same road in circles. I can never tell what you want. Because you never say anything." She stopped, eyes blazing like the wickedly hot smoke of a burning cigarette butt, stamped onto flesh.  
  
The biting cold air stung Rory's lungs. She felt her sanguine morning- fresh manner slipping between her fingers, too numb to grasp at it. "I am your goddamn wife, Jess!" she hollered. The sting was raw, poking her throat and flushing her cheekbones with tinted force. "You are supposed to be happy, too. You are supposed...supposed to be..."  
  
She moaned, her hands shaking slightly, cutting at the draft ripping past their twister, their eye of the tornado. "You're supposed to care enough to stop giving me the cold shoulder!" Blind to the reaction of the world, she turned and walked away swiftly, shoulders hunched up underneath her earlobes and arms wrapped firmly around herself, like an angry present, an unwanted present soon to be put in a corner and forgotten.  
  
And as she walked, the rope grew thinner from being stretched so far, and it began to feather, small quills meeting oxygen as they detached from the thickness of the original twine. It extended, and bent around the corners of the impermanent prism houses, and its strength, its fortitude, began to diminish. It never broke, snapped, uncoiled itself into a heap of threads,  
  
But both felt it slowly tapering. Rory only hoped he would follow the rope and tighten it again, and he only hoped he would be able to.  
  
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10:00 PM  
  
Jess could smell pears when he opened the front door, the translucent cherry type that float in liquid form through a basin of lukewarm water, frothing with shimmery lavender bubbles. He inhaled deeply, savoring the sacrament of Rory's scent, the aroa of her collar and perfume of her persona. Every effective filament in the apartment was burning now, each lightbulb alive with fuzzy yellow glow and orange coronas. Walking past the couch, he trailed his thumb along the heated black leather of the cushions, never softer than her skin, her voice's music. Rory was never a heavy kind of music, always a lighter foam melody. Silence ate away at the sudsy, flute-like frost coating her will, and he cursed himself for scraping so harshly at the spume, the residue so appreciated.  
  
Stopping at the door to the bedroom, he steadied his gaze on the sliver between two woods; no light creeped away from inside and spread, a one- dimensional monochrome rainbow on the oak. It was dark, and the violin of tears reached his ears gradually, melding into his drums and making him wince without a second thought, another feeling, another pang or twinge or regret.  
  
It was the quietest kind of crying...a weep with so much consequence that you could taste it in the molecules barely passing by, feel it on the fingernails lacking in nerves, see it in your eyelids when you squeezed them like bitter lemons.  
  
He pulled on the lock with enough tension to make its noise omniscient, reappearing in another room and away from the hushed whimperings.  
  
The room was dark, the blinds pulled down...and he found that he could not see his palm inches from his face as he groped at nothingness, making his way in the memorized direction of the bed. His legs hit a hard soft – round brown comforter covering rough, dark wood. Jess' ears watched a muted crinkle of skin and bedsheets, then the sharp, high cling of metal and plastic...the lamp turned on and Rory sat, her back stiff as wet straw, against the headboard. Her hair was disheveled slightly, and a shadow hung on a half of her face, a present black-and-white still. Her face had streaks of shine, like long, slight blisters, only water-born. Jess' eyes softened, and their colors merged into pastels. He followed the slope of her body underneath a gray shirt, fragile china curves and slender, pallid arms.  
  
"It." Her voice cracked, and he shook his head, stopping her, landing gently on the bed. He pushed himself back, sitting like a bent cardbaord cutout in her same way...sitting next to his paperdoll.  
  
She rolled her head sideways, watching his face stay still.  
  
"I'm...I'm sorry about what I said," he began, not sure of his own speech, his own pronunciation. She cut him off.  
  
"It was negative." Her voice crackled like television snow, and the dams in her pupils crumbled down. The floods began.  
  
Then he knew what exactly had been negatory. And he could not stop the floods he saw...or the ones he, himself, felt.  
  
"I turned out the light and tried to drop back to sleep, but it's face floated before me, bodiless and smiling..." Sylvia Plath  
  
A/N: OK, I'm not creative today...Please please pretty please review! I will love you forever! 


	11. Ferocious Watercolor

A/N: Before I begin this chapter, there are a few things I must say:  
  
--- Anastasia Athene --- You leave me the best reviews all of the time! I love your little list things; they inspire me! I was having such a writer's block lately, trying to think of what to put into this chapter, and I read your reviews and got all excited! I have also put in another Beatles review plea at the bottom of this chapter. Thanks for being such a faithful reviewer!  
  
--- Shouhei --- You're the best beta a girl could ask for! And so sweet :P Thanks for always thinking my writing is great, even when I am 100% sure that it sucks. This chapter is for you. And everyone, please read Shouhei's "Like Father Like Daughter," it is fabulous and unique and...oh, words don't hold any meaning here :D Go read it! Go on!  
  
--- All reviewers --- to everyone who has reviewed 'O Citadel of Love' so far (Shouhei, Anastasia Athene, naleyfan, sarahl, smile1, Shem, KT, someone5, vintagequeen, ineedajess, KT, M5lvrgrl, jlangblues891, Lilly, AlexiaWarren, Regina Falangi, EAM, Marren, Screamer, & Lunatic Lauren). You are the bestest ever! All of your reviews are wonderful, and I take all of your advice and use it to improve my story. I'm not the greatest at 'suspense' and 'cliffhangers' and those kinds of things, but I will do what I do best and I hope that you continue to enjoy this story.

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THE FOLLOWING MONDAY; 7:30 AM

Jess awoke unhurriedly that morning; although imaginary, the torpid scent of warm rainwater flooded his nose and its moist sensation, an idle quality, landed gently on his back and bowed over his sides. He lay suspended in the liberty between slumber and perception, unwilling to move beyond daybreak's path. The perfume of this sky water, an adjective of a fictional fiction, calmed his mind and burst the pods of tension dispersed throughout his body, allowing for the warmed, filmy, apprehensive liquids inside to spill over onto the mattress. The animated fluid engulfed him in the smarting yet solacing odor of a muted blue rain-morning, pulling him deeper against the sheets...the light rain became a downpour, and the lagoon grew higher, warmer.  
  
Only but one offense at his senses could deplete the basin...a feather depletion, a straw of smoke...rosy smoke. Today it was rosy...tomorrow, there were endless prospects...cerulean, jade, scarlet, bullion, ashen gray...  
  
She was his rosy smoke. A naïve silhouette of truth, mitigating rainwater and being the scent of a cactus flower, worn with time but a graceful epoching of immortality.  
  
"There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapped in perfect unconsciousness." The rosy smoke boiled.  
  
Jess rolled over, the rainwater, its sound, and its sensation far away now, barely visible. This was his drowsy state, and he intended on ongoing his viaje through the terra firma of flitting cactus flowers. So pink.  
  
Rory continued, her voice the suppurate between facets. "...at such times, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space..."  
  
"...when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate." Jess' eyes flippantly opened like the shutter of a camera, and his whites lacked the default white hue. They were a roseate, and they matched the coral of hers. It had been a turbulent night...everything of a hurricane but its eye.  
  
"Hi..." he groaned, eyelids closing again, an allusion to the impression that he was discomfited of his damp eyes, a rouge not often seen in the dark russet orbs. "Oliver Twist."  
  
"Hm, I didn't know you heard me." Rory slid in next to him, the sheets starchy and stiff but still warm from the impression he had made upon them. She smelled his hair, musky and rich, running a finger down the back of his head as she rested her head on his chest. Cheek to torso, she could feel the softened, consistent thumping of his heartbeat, one of the few things that was unswerving nowadays. Rory trusted his heart, and its unending stilled her. Her heart slowly matched his.  
  
"Ah, hm." Jess adjusted himself, pulling an arm from underneath his back. The arm found its way to the small of her back, and moved up to feel the staticy loops of hair encircling her neck. And so the somnolent traveler rested, tempted to ascend farther, but knowing that rest would grant him a farther trek the next morning...he had found her pulse, matching his from all sides, all decibels.  
  
One of the few uniformities now, he thought. She thought. Minds mingle, having been made so carefully. Hearts as of the seemingly artificial connections, the crucial links in a chain of the wraithlike knowledge of beings...that this was meant to be.  
  
There is but one more uniform knowledge, one incessant lingering thought in both preordained benevolences, clinging to one another yet so distant...refutations.  
  
Refutations, every other evening, etched in blue on cold, heartless plastic. Refutations discarded, cursed...the negatory quality of blue is now more thoroughly understood. One cannot understand the depression of inky indigo without seeing this long thin plastic stick...a harsh object for a harsh reality.  
  
The minus, the subtraction, the math of taking away was now a hostility...a resented frosty acquaintance.  
  
But a constant nonetheless............ "-"...............

6:30 PM

Newspapers bothered Jess; they engraved little marks in his assurance every time, curling away tiny shards of it like irregular, agglutinative orange peel. Job advertisements were now another opponent, another adversary to fight with. But like most books, the conflict, the climax, the pinnacle was inevitable, and the fight with the boss was unavoidable. He preferred to think in metaphors, but the far reaches of his imagination were beginning to wean off of his detestation of homelife. The allegory was becoming the fluid correlation between the visible written word and the visual television screen.  
  
Thoroughly agitated with a relentless group of useless career opportunities, he slammed the paper shut, but it refused to symbolize the tense feeling coarsing through his nerves and his blood vessels, liquid aggravation with everything. The negatories, literal and figurative, were slowly taking the place of gentle morning rainwater.  
  
The sound of a faucet always reminds one of something else. The swiftly hollow, glassy, eternal exhalation as coaly blue water streamed onto unkind white ceramic brought his mind to a suicidal genre of literature, to 'Hold On'-type ballads, to the asperous feeling of seemingly-tough body to hard brick wall.  
  
The rip of the paper towel, quiet but brusque, corresponded with the ripping of caterwauling sound-associations from his being.  
  
The adjusting of his misty, wet eyes, eyelashes dripping from the guileless hurling of arctic water against his dry olive face, and the realization that the stick had been unnoticed the past evening was unforeseen, a shock unnoticed.  
  
Like a fierce, brilliant flash of lightning, a caveat signal fizzled throughout his mind, skipping synapses and jumping arbitrarily, a drugged psyche snap, the false peak of hope. Every time she came home with a plastic bag, his neurons began pounding on his skull...Jess assumed that it really was composed of tin, and each time they began to hammer, he could hear a resonant, metallic ringing and felt small, imagined dents throughout his head. Every time she entered the bathroom and the door was left (a permanent fixture, a bodyguard much needed and much used...) open...every time his mind connected something ingenuously chance with the possibility of an irregularity, the banging and clattering began.  
  
The summit of the mountain of artificial hope and false aspirations was simple to reach, but even simpler to slide back down, hitting a massive, brutal army of jagged boulders and merciless pine remnants along the way. It was much like a short-term memory loss, for each time, each moment of knowledge of the contents of the plastic bag, the bloodiness and depression of the consequence was forgotten. Ancient history. If only, he thought, studying the knots in the wooden floor. If only I could remember the sheer awfulness of manmade rejection.  
  
I am rejecting myself, she is rejecting herself. This is.................................pathetic.  
  
Jess averted his eyes to the plastic stick anyway, having full knowledge of its insufferable presence, and in those infinitesimal time measures, he had already reached the peak of the mountain. Now all that was left was sliding down. Hope minus hope equals a rough ride down.

7:00 PM  
  
The sky was gray, an enormous raindrop encompassing the city, the continent, the world. It was a shattered shard of glass, rounded from its former part in the wholeness of a vase, lying deceased on the pavement...black pavement. He felt metal everywhere...this is what life is like in a thermometer; the unsullied draw of the mercury traps you in this suffocating glass tube of eternal ups and downs, pros and cons...hopes and despair...the misery of not knowing how high you will surface and how deep you will sink.  
  
In the end, it is all a slow sinkage, a drowning...only oceans of different depth...different moods.  
  
It had been negative, and he had stupidly looked anyway, stupidly climbed anyway.  
  
"Jess? Jess." Breaking through the entrapping thin glass of the mercury tube was Rory's voice, and he turned, looking through the cloudy translucent piece of vase and out at her, who had turned on the harsh yellow light in the bathroom and was searching the countertop with nimble but ineffective fingers.  
  
As if she had summited the mountain only to, like him, fall back down onto the snowy, muddy earth below, realization washed over her without a gentle touch and she turned away from the counter, closing her eyes and letting the air drain from her lungs.  
  
It was a mechanical effort, the releasing of carbon monoxide, but it was the type of day when the oxygen seemed to leave too, absconding to the draft of other lives.  
  
Jess knew what she had been looking so frantically for; he stepped out from behind the sharp piece of frosted glass.  
  
"Um, I..." he shoved his hands into his pockets perfunctorily, and began to memorize the grains of color in the ceiling for only the pleasure of his short-term memory. Rory opened her eyes and watched him study.  
  
Since the last time a stick had rejected her, she had forced her mind into refusing to climb the mountain, and her voice had followed suit; it was low, solid, a bassoon. A sad truth.  
  
"Jess, did you already...was it..." the sentence ended before it began. Rory mimicked him, and let her hands rest in the cradles of corduroy that were her pockets. She felt frosty; the rain fogged up. "It was negative," he snapped, watching her fade off into a land of mixed emotions. He did not want to cry today, and on the top of the list of things that would blast the valves was his wife.  
  
"Oh, yeah, I figured that." She smiled fakely, a circus clown smile, so goofy that he embraced it with his eyes but feared it with his heart. Jess hoped that he would not be doomed to these counterfeit grins forever. And so the dinner preparations began.  
  
There was PJ Harvey and spinach linguine, which Rory was particularly fond of. For dessert, there was lemon sorbet. Jess picked at the perfectly cylindrical, pale yellow brick with his spoon, and Rory giggled.  
  
They lay nestled on the couch, wrapped up in a moment of utter cliché, laughing and remembering the simplicity of high school. Rory silently cursed the present, wishing for the past to return. In high school, her biggest worries were final exams and the thought of Jess running off again, and the sliver of possibility that Luke's diner would disappear in a whirlwind of charcoal-gray smoke, a Dorothy-type paradox.  
  
There was even the segue between their current predicament of removing the ice from its container and the childish contests between Rory and Lane over who could hold an entire ice in their mouth the longest, gasping and hopping and letting yellow and cherry juices drip down their chins and stain their lips. Now, there was more: her job, the bills, her husband...negatives.  
  
Shaking her head, she continued to watch Jess' fingers, strongly clasped around the spoon handle, and study the faint hint of his velvety dark pink tongue breaking through dry thin lips. There was stubble, but not so much that she could feel the short, stout hairs with her fingers when she ran them over his jaw; his eyes, squinting into burnt chestnuts, made small tan wrinkles in his soft, warm face.  
  
"Somebody should paint you," she said abruptly, stopping him at his work. Jess looked up, searching her eyes for a reason. His lips curved upward into a smile, and he licked them with a warm pinkness that made her irises blaze, become a warmer blue.  
  
Jess could feel the ice melting a little. No longer looking at it, he felt the spoon soften it, dent the grainy surface. Not as cold; not as hard.  
  
"If it were I who was to be always young and picture to grow old, I would give my soul for it," he whispered thinly. Rory smiled. She knew it like she knew his face, but knew that Jess would never become a Dorian Gray. This made the smile broaden. Jess breathed, relieved – he was not doomed to the faux grin for the rest of his time.  
  
"Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray," she whispered back. It was a strained whisper, it lacked something. "Jess..."  
  
"Hm..." he made a moon voice, an echo she would like to store away and keep repeating in her ears, a ringing pleasantness. He straightened himself, shifted, let the container slip from his hands. It was no longer icy, but a watery golden. "Rory..." his breath met her neck, a long, slender bow of the willow tree.  
  
"Rory, can I paint your picture..." it was less of a inquiry and more of a moan, an expression of a desire.  
  
Rory's pallet was one of dragonfruit pinks...the pinks of the petals of daisies before they meld into the yellowness of the center. There was vivid, fierce, startling beryl blue, the blue of the depths of oceans and tips of a cornflower. And white – an orangey-white, the white of liquid vanilla and roseate sunset skies.  
  
And she explored his, with its splintery wooden base coated in thick deep brown, a black forest of deep hues, the color of the shadowy halls of the estate, the silk of an epoch tie. And olive, olive of Venice, olive of brown and tan and green and the coffee she loved so much. She relished the olive...there was bright garnet, a red so blinding it mixed all colors – dahlia, burgundy, cardinal, carmine...one.  
  
So many colors on one white pallet of sheets leaves nothing but a stunning painting.  
  
Art is often not appreciated...

THE NEXT MORNING, 7:30 AM

Rory woke from her slumber to an unnatural sting, a buzzing with no noise but with millions of vibrations pulsating through her lower body. Then, there was a sharper throb in her stomach, and for a split second she could swear on the lukewarm temperature of a tattered Bookers armchair that she was feeling her blood flowing through the veins of her torso. The stinging corresponded with the flashes of burgundy stain flash on her eyelids. There was pain, but a passive kind, for Rory was more interested in the drifting hues on her closed lids than the thought-to-be-imaginary throbbing through her body.  
  
She enjoyed her eyelids; when staring hard enough, she watched lakes of color drift by through the chocolate background – teal, ruby rose, chartreuse.  
  
And crimson...bright, bloody crimson...  
  
"Jess!" he jolted up like a jack-in-the-box, reluctant but willing. An eerie sensation floated over his body and the room became stale, smelly. The sheet fell from his chest, and his skin erupted in goosebumps. Above, the fan whirred, and waves of cold air rushed at him. On his other side Rory lay, eyes swelling with confusion – the pain had been real, as did its painting. Upper body balanced by the backs of her palms, the thin white blanket lay pooled at her feet. Jess' eyes traveled calmly down her pearly skin...and stopped at her thighs, long and lanky and red.  
  
A fierce red, bright and vivid covered her legs and most of the sheet encircling them, manifesting itself slowly. Rory shuddered, her breathing shallow and quick, an irregular idiom of shock and worry.  
  
"Rory." She turned to him, eyes cloudy and constantly moving, running back and forth over his. He pulled her against him, and she held her chest against his, lithe arms on shoulder blades. Moments later she pulled away.  
  
"I have to...oh my God..."she stood up, pulling the tucked-in sheet from under the mattress and wrapped herself messily in it. Rory stomped her feet up and down on the carpet nervously, just staring at the oddly continental shape of the dry, ruddy blood where she had been lying moments before.  
  
Jess rolled out of his side of the bed and pulled the top sheet over the mattress cover, hiding the object of fear. He walked calmly over to her, and put two hands on her shoulders, running his thumbs up and down her upper arms. These were mountains he could climb up and down upon without his heart sinking.  
  
"Jess, what if..."  
  
"Don't say it." So they stood. Then Rory untangled herself from him, and walked shakily into the bathroom. The door closed angrily, the lock clicked, and the sound of a shower spigot filled his ears.  
  
The what if scared his own menace away, leaving him with the shell of himself, and the knowledge that there was no water for him to turn on, no noise to hide behind. He felt useless, even with the information that he knew the technicalities of the blood...that they might have been wrong.  
  
Would it have mattered anyway?  
  
So he did what Rory would have done if there had been no noise to hide behind, and picked up the phone. He knew who would answer...but not why he was calling...  
  
So much blood and he could not understand.  
  
A/N: Okay, here goes: I get by with a little help from reviews, oh, I can try with a little help from reviews, oh, I get high with a little help from REVIEWS...  
  
I tried to bring the wording and prose in this chapter back to the story's 'roots,' so to speak, so let me know if it's better, worse, etc. I love all of my reviewers, and your opinion is so important! I'll try to churn out the next chapter as soon as I can!  
  
Oh, and just a thingy: Anyone who has any sense at all will read Lipton Lee's "The Orange Soda Will Get You Every Time." So funny, so good...ah, just go read it!


	12. Tintinnabulation

A/N: This is going to be the only chapter for at least two and a half weeks, because I'm going on vacation from the seventh to the twenty-second. I'll miss you all! And I will miss fanfiction so much! I think I might waste away to nothing, or pull a Wicked Witch (haha Sara) and melt into a puddle without my daily Literati dosage. Let's call it a...hiatus. But I promise I will write like crazy during vacation and have another beautiful chapter for you when I get back!

A/N: Just a quick thingey. I changed the rating of this story to PG-13 because I don't know if it's going to be sailing into the land of graphic violence, sex, and vicious expletives. Oh yeah- because I leave tomorrow at 5, I am so busy and doing last-minute packing so I posted this without the help of my beta. When I get back, I'll re-post the betaed version. Sorry about that! Love you Sara!

--- Shouhei --- I say the same thing every time...you know you're the best beta and you don't need to hear it from me. Love ya.

--- Anastasia Athene --- If there was an Emmy for Greatest and Most Honest Reviewer of Primetime Fanfiction, you would SO take home the sparkly little gold trophy!!!

--- LiptonLee --- LiptonLee read my story! Plus, she likes it! She really really likes it! :jumps on bed: That was the best pick-me-up I've had in a while. R-E-S-P-E-C-T to you, my friend.

On to Chapter 12. Here's hoping you enjoy it and don't find it a waste of your time. If you do find it to be a waste, then by all means, go back to the drawing board and pick a new story!!! Have fun :waves:...

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THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON

Rory liked hospitals. The order, the conduct, the precision and competence of a building so gigantic amazed and frightened her both at once; she could feel herself growing smaller and younger each time she was in the Beth Israel Medical Center. The staff seemed so youthful and clean and lofty compared to her, and they all appeared to have more experience and worldly knowledge than she. Sitting in a waiting room on the top floor, Rory had a great sense of security and took comfort in the knowledge that everything surrounding her was hygenically cleaned and sanitized. Although she had a reaction of meekness and inferiority, knowing that she was secure and sterile calmed her nerves. It was a zenith-lacking march through a moist, slothful woods; the steam was gray, a dryest soil-born ice, and continued to rise and assail the nucleus of one's sanity, but one had a sole ounce of knowing that it was a pheonix feather cycle in the forest and it would never alter. ...A positive.

Jess hated hospitals. They were cold and pitiless, much like himself at times, and reeked of rubbing alcohol and iodine and bitterness. Everywhere he turned he saw white – bleak, blank white. The uncomfortable sense that sent constant shivers down his back and through his legs caused him to hunch over in the dark pink, plastic chair, his head resting between his hands. It was even more uncomfortable to be sitting next to Rory, who was as unruffled and static as a newborn fawn, and be twitching nervously, a shaky bomb with an explosion potential of gigantic proportions.

Time passed...frosty, white, painful sparkle dusts fell.

And then there were two trembling time bombs, anxiously twitching and twiddling their thumbs and running hands through their hair, marionettes in a cruel, time-consuming stage performance. Every action by the other was repeated, every breath drawn seemed motorized, wooden. Every sight was too vivid and false. Every sadness seemed disguised by a translucent theater mask.

"Hey, uh, Jess."

Jess' head snapped up, breaking the puppet strings, and he turned to Rory slowly, readjusting himself on the cold, rigid seat. Her eyes were a rich cobalt today, monochrome and stunning, oceans so far away from his universe. He would like to visit them someday.

"Yeah, uh...are you okay?" he asked, licking his chapped lips, held tightly against his face, the color drained from them.

She who drew the warm auburn to his cheeks in silvery sleet sunrises, reached a hand out and drew it through his hair, as if searching for something. She found his soft, thick brown curls and pulled them gently...a treasure she would keep. Another memory for her mind. Voice...neck...curls. "Yeah...but are you okay?"

"Mm-hm." It was a short answer, and his face was swimming with contradictions to it, but Rory dismissed it as his temperament, a torpid last runner, hitting crushing, spiteful pavement with the discovery of newfound emotions. She slowly lifted her hand from his hair and scratched the back of her neck impatiently. Each time she did so, as time passed, she itched harder and longer. A small red, freckled patch had appeared there and it bothered Jess. He felt red, itchy...small. This was a red velvet sea, and he was sinking into the nadir of the rough lapping waves. It was gritty, a hard reality...a mighty sandstorm of flying specks of hatred, swelling his eyes and blinding him from the path. It should be capitalized, he thought, for the stories of the future. The Path. The Path That I Left Behind...On Misfortune Alone. The Path of Negatives.

He could see the sadistic, sparking hue of blood each time he shut his eyes, and as he drifted away from the mission at hand, Jess felt himself slipping lower and lower into a quicksand. He had her hand, and he pulled her down too. It was so black below. A lover's midnight...the lovers never experienced the sheer freedom of ripe sunlight again.

He rolled his eyes over the expanse of white wall across from him, and his mind was suddenly flooded with images and words. Not once moving his head, he spoke hoarsely, a melodious sandpaper.

"...in the icy air of night, while the stars that oversprinkle, all the heavens seem to twinkle, with a crystalline delight."

The sinking sand was becoming a mountain of snow, a cloud of snowflake razors...because the façade always overpowers the trebuchet of pebbles. He continued shakily. Her eyelashes ignored catching the falling flurries...wet rich cobalt today.

"...to the tintinnabulation that so musically swells."

He received his reward, the bright pricking of white razors becoming sun-ripened purpleblue blizzards of the things clouds are made of.

Rory smiled, lips a geranium red, moist from her tongue. "Did you ever think it was ironic...Poe being, well, Poe and all, that he wrote a semi-happy poem?" Jess smirked, but his actions seemed muted by the dull, angular, suffocating white box they seemed to be trapped in. That morning...a six-sided anxiety...genunine actions they were not.

"No."

Rory's lips widened, the sky-blue pink once on her cheeks peeking out from the entrance of the dark, pallid cavern. "Why?"

"Because." Jess locked eyes with her. Two locks, different codes...both opened just the same. Both liked that. "We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same."

"Anne Frank and Poe within the same debate," Rory mused. It was as true as ice is water is sunlight – she was so different from him, a different history...but they were both happy because now they were a history themselves.

Someone dropped the geranium vase. Their solitary world was interrupted by the monotone hum from the reception desk. Rory's feet had another plan, and although she longed to stay in her comfortable anxiousness on the hard pink chair, they got up, silently obeying the call of a nurse. Jess' feet followed hastily.

And then, there was less white...but enough white. It was no longer a blank canvas, but rather one with some paint strokes upon it, watery from the paintbrush. The gynecologist's office was stuffy, a few wispy jade ferns sitting in clay pots and an intimidating mahogany bookcase filled with glossy hardcovers being the only true colors. The atmosphere reminded Rory of the thick yellow plastic tube slides at the playground...barely roomy enough to squeeze through, the friction of a sneaker would stop you in the middle of the dark, echoing slide and trap you for a panicky three seconds. It was a detour in a twisting tube slide that just continued. Her mind dwelled on the possibility of a treatment for clostrophobia.

"We had some tests done," the doctor began, as the width of the slide became smaller. "I'm sorry..."

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8:00 PM (SAME NIGHT)

Miscarraige was a heavy word, a lead cylinder that pained Jess' tongue even when he did not speak it. It bounced lethargically against his head, each time causing a throbbing sensation much like the syncapated drum beats of The Capitol. Like most things, the throbbing lit a brilliant yellow fire in his heart...he decided to himself that the least it could do was throb rhythmically. When it could not even manage this, he locked the door of the office and began to finger through the bookcase. Knowing that plastic lied to him, and it was not even capable of doing so, scorched his muscles to the core. Not until that lie was indeed a truth was he aware. Late awareness lit another fire, this time in his mind. He moved down one shelf to the next row of books.

A first was established, a precedent transformed – a book would not soften his heart or his head.

Jess hadn't looked at the picture album in a very long time, and a thin spiderweb of dust spread over the ivory cover. He ran his hand over the front, his fingers catching the net. He rubbed his fingers together, feeling the gray stain his thumb. He had been afraid to look since that night when she found it and they danced to nothing. After the slow slide through the tube this afternoon, this wouldn't faze any of his layers, misleading as they were.

There was the first picture, one he would always be reluctant to admit as his favorite but still love anyway– lengthy lace eyelashes, soft china skin, scarlet rose mouth – timeless, never once changing face. The halo of wavy coffee wisps curling, pink-tinted cobwebs, around her features made his lips curl upward; he reached a finger out cautiously, running it around the silhouette of her body; and he realized that never once had he missed what he had never had so much.

Jess leaned his back against the wall and slid down until he sat on the knotted wooden floor, bright manila streaks of sun from the darkening skyline hanging, still nonlives, in the air and creating shadow patterns on his legs.

The heaps of soft snow he had felt before were becoming snowflake razors again.

A soft, quick knock on the door was responded to by the rapid shutting closed of the album. Rory opened the door slowly. She stepped in, a young deer new to walking, glancing at the clutter in the cave of a room. Her hair hung around her face, a few locks curling gracefully around her forehead and cheekbones. He remembered painting her...

But her eyes had been dry, sky blue. Now, they were a rich, moist indigo. Like the one o'clock winds. She finally rested her eyes on him. He attempted a smile but his nerves were sleeping, his senses numbed from thought to deep for even his own senses, concrete emotion that left bruises on every inch of skin.

"Hey," she whispered huskily, pulling herself up on the balls of her feet, then down onto her heels again. Barefoot...Jess traced a slight navy vein down her ankle, across the bridge of her foot, and up to her round, milky white toes.

"Jess, um," she began, pulling in air. He looked up at her, and noticed a small glass droplet fly from her eyelash to the floor.

And he knew that they both knew it. That the harrowing ride down the mountain of hope had fallen to the floor inside of the glassy tear just shed.

She held out her arm, in her hand a plastic stick, her eyes damp and squeezed shut but her mouth a bright, breathtaking geranium smile again.

Pink...not blue.

...pink.

This feeling of addition, of adding, of positives...Jess and Rory both decided on their own that they should like to never subtract again. To no longer waste and desecrate and dispose became an eleventh commandment, an unspoken decree.

Rory could feel her own eyes smiling, cheery purple blues through a brook swiftly enriched with elation. The brook no longer wept, but cried blissfully. ...Happy tears.

All Jess could hear were bells – a muscial swelling of an uncomfortable, novel yet icily warm tintinabulation rolling through his ears.

So they danced to nothing but the sounds of a million resonating bells and a babbling brook...

The best kind of music a silence could know.

"Hear the sledges with the bells, silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle in the icy air of night, while the stars that oversprinkle all the heavens, seem to twinkle with a crystalline delight..." –Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bells"

A/N: I hope you liked it! Please let me know what you think. Be back soon!


	13. Californian Trees Grow Tall And So Do We

A/N: Haha. I read some of my reviews, and nearly all of them said something to the effect of, "how could she be pregnant on the same day as miscarrying," etc. That is entirely my fault because I have none of that "patience is a virtue" thing. I posted it without it being betaed, and because I didn't have Sara beta it for me, I missed that I didn't put in the little dots and a description of the next time frame. It looks like everything occurred in one day, but the time between her miscarraige and discovering that she was pregnant was 2 months.

Alright, I know that I said I would write another chapter while I was away...hehe. Well, I sort of forgot. :stares at shoes and cackles evilly inside mind while externally cowering in shame: Anyway, it's really long...and fluffy. Now as usual:

--- Shouhei --- Sara betaed this mile-long chapter in record time! Clap for Sara! :readers give standing ovation; whistle and call positive sentiments: Muchas gracias!

---Anastasia Athene --- You are without a doubt the reviewer I most look forward to getting feedback from. Your last review plastered this goofy grin on my face so cocky that it could have been ripped right off of Pelle Almqvist's mouth.

--- someone5 --- I'm so glad you liked it! Your last comment gave me a toothy Patrick Star smile...when somebody melts my face into the likeness of a pudgy pink cartoon starfish, they deserve some kind of recognition.

--- Lipton Lee --- I love you, I love you, I love you...did I mention I love you? And PS: I am sending love waves in your direction.

--- smile1 --- You are ALWAYS reviewing this, and you are so frank and sweet. Thanks for continuing to read even though this fic is fluffier than lite ReddiWhip.

GEE WHIZ!

WARNING: _MAJOR FLUFF AHEAD..._

..............................................................................................

Ballet was for people like Terry Walker because he could count each step and the timing of a single dip and twirl to absorb his emotions. Dancing was meant for the satiny, gleaming persons of a Jane Austen novel; twirling on a pearly marble floor from behind the tightly knit red cover of Pride and Prejudice. As Jess watched his fingers trace pirouettes of temperate nothingness on her back, nonbeing curlicues over and across her shoulderblades, passages jumped at him – leaped, rather, and landed smoothly upon the mahogany floor in front of him, his flecked eyes mirroring their every movement. He thought it was fitting that his fingers be a warm moist red now, the color of a wonderland, of sunsets, of bar-lined hallways brimming with the grace of allegro.

Provisos and definitions spread their lithe glass legs in arabesque whispers, filling his mind with a myriad of starbursts and reminding him of Rory's sunset shades...plum and something unmistakably golden. As if on cue from the wings of gauzy curtains swaying lazily in the early October leafbreeze, a row of letters managed a delicate ciseaux in the weighty air and landed at the foot of the bed. Jess could feel his feet move without caveat, making room for the row of words. Words always welcome. He almost smiled but for the heaviness of a Saturday morning freshness pulling at lips and keeping his body straight and warm beneath stiff static cotton.

"To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love," he heard, melodiously lofting through his head. In his past, Jess remembered reading that line and contemplating its authenticity. Jess of margin-writing and unprompted disappearances. Now, he could but solely concentrate on his finger tracing trellises of flowing shapes along an expanse of silken pallet...skin that reminded him of what honeydew would be if it was not a fruit...sugar-spun yellow and azure morning breaths and the deep, hollow spheres of wet morning dew scattered...through Rory's hair.

In this daylight, with a thick air napping like an imperceptible hummingbird over his head and the constance of his finger, absentmindedly reminding itself of every millimeter of her canvas of shoulders and dewy trail of a stepping-stone spine, he could no longer question the authenticity of Jane Austen's declaration, or his skill at the waltz.

And so his finger danced, knowing that it was in love. He knew he was in love. He knew...that he loved.

Jess was confident that he was, if only a novice, someone who had held onto that passage until he didn't need to question it to know it was true.

---...---...---

TWO HOURS LATER

"Hum...hm...agh, Jess." Rory decided that today was not the type of day when she would sit up to face the sunlit room; instead, she rolled over onto her side, her head propped up on her hand. Jess reluctantly watched her back disappear from under his thumb, replaced by her long, arched side...reluctance vanished. Jess traced her, the malleable balmy suppleness of her skin wax paper beneath his chalk pencil. He felt that if he concentrated hard enough, she could become any of a million things...a flitting shadow of an elf owl, a smoky scent wafting in atop a draft, a drop of dew, flawlessness in his palm.

"That would be me," he murmured huskily. Rory could taste him, even in everything around them. She buried her face in the pillow, inhaling deeply, and came into him, into his presence...the pillowcase tasted like Jess, a bitter sandpaper with a surprisingly cordial aftertaste. She grinned ridiculously into the pillowcase, and a spontaneous burst of bubblesoap laughter escaped her lips, a cavernous cotton echo muffled by thousands of threads.

When she finally opened her eyes, Jess thought that they were larger, so much more opulent and rich with color than any other day. He could not help it – they were globular invitations, beckoning to him each time he brought his eyes to her. They were wet this morning, as if on the verge of tears, but neither spilled...just sparkled.

She smiled back at him, the specks of redbark dancing in his own eyes. When Jess' eyes smiled, which was a rare occasion, his whole face seemed to mirror it, even if his jaw stayed square and straight. Rory reached up and connected her hand with his, mirroring it. Even with her fingers sitting on his, they grasped, held. Jess felt alike – the...he didn't know how it would feel on his tongue, but he would try it anyway...the baby seemed too much of a blessing to be a reality. Jess didn't normally believe in blessings, so to speak, which undermined the whole conceivablility of the concept in the first place.

"Baby." It was scratchy...but it was there. Afterwards, he ran his tongue over the shape of his mouth, rolling it over his teeth, tasting words. New words. Fresh, new...promising.

Rory's eyes, if not round enough, grew wide, and she arched her eyebrows. Jess couldn't help but notice that the thin brown lines became a softly Rory arrow, indicating the vibrance of her eyes now. It helped Jess that Rory's eyes were so captivating that he couldn't break eye contact – it made him seem slightly more serious when his insides screamed satire.

"What?" she asked, studying his face.

"Well, what are you going to call it?" he snapped. Rory noted that his snaps were becoming like a worn trampoline – easier to bounce back on....they lost their edge. Dull blades...she liked that he'd forgotten to sharpen them.

"I don't know...Jane?" It floated out of her mouth like elegiac text...something he had only come across in The Song Of Despair...this had no trace of despair, let alone desolation, in it, and Jess found a new medium for reading.

"As in Austen?" he inquired, his fingers teetering on the brink of her side, about to fall down a cliff of endless white china and rosy tea lace.

"I was actually thinking more along the lines of Eyre," she giggled, his fingers leaning. She just wanted them to fall, and wanted to feel the split second when they foraged her skin. She came into a lightheaded sunthick feeling that she had come this far for only that second...that time frame so short but that seemed too long.

"Ms. Bronte it is, then," he whispered. And his fingers fell, catching themselves on her navel, tasting with thumbprints, landing on the sheets. A second trapped in minutes.

............

A call to anybody from any place at any time of day or night always had the potential to make Rory nervous. Muted, automatic trilling on the other end of the line as she lay on the couch, feet hooked onto the top of the sofaback and head hanging over the cushions, upside down, seemed to make the blood rush to her head faster. Mulling this over, she started humming Clocks absentmindedly.

Jess smirked inwardly while staring straight ahead out of the French doors, dark lemony light making lakes on the floor as the sun began to disappear.

"Laverne," called a voice, singsonging through the cords and bouncing in lopsided ovals in Rory's ear.

"Shirley," she bounced back. Rory surprised herself – her self-identification was more bouncy than she had intended, and more genuine at that.

"Oh, sweet child o' mine," mused Lorelai. Rory pictured her mother scrunched on the couch, watching a VH1 tribute to Guns and Roses. "Tell me, offspring, do you have eyes of the bluest skies?"

"I have eyes bluer than the bluest of skies," Rory corrected, playing along. Hearing this, Jess couldn't help but subconsciously agree.

"Now here's the burning question, offspring," Lorelai answered firmly. "Sweet child...do I see an ounce of pain?" The last part floated out in pure Roses melody.

"Mom," Rory began. Jess turned around from facing the windows and leaned against the glass. For some reason, he wanted to hear her say it.

"What's shakin', bacon?"

"Uh...guess." Rory cowered, and blasphemed herself for letting her haywire nerves take over. Jess smirked. She looked up and glared; he barely manage to supress a full-blown smirk.

"You're pregnant!"

"Uh...no."

"Hm...you're moving back here to live with me?"

"Hah, uh, no."

"Wow, toughie...you got promoted?"

"Nope. Uh, Mom."

"I give up anyway, so just tell me before the show comes back on. My commerical break is almost over." Lorelai sniggered. Jess held his breath. He began to imagine how loud Lorelai's screaming would be when Rory broke the news.

"Um..." Rory struggled with words, also trying to comprehend her insurmountable edginess. "It's your first guess, Mom."

Rory's ear met with no sounds or laughter or tears or hollers. For a moment, she feared that Lorelai had hung up in shock...or something else wholly unrealistic. Then, a penetrating squeal assailed her earlobe with such force that Rory felt a cutting sensation.

"Eeee! Oh my God!"

Jess grinned. He had known unerringly how she would respond – and for once, refrained from dumping Lorelai in the mentally-unstable category. He only wished that he could scream himself. A joyful noise...naturally.

TWO MONTHS LATER

Rory liked this hospital much better – not only did it seem structured, but the walls were not white. It was unlikely for a medical center, even to the point of dubiousness, but she was fairly sure that her eyesight was not failing. A cheerful, syrupy egg grass blue seemed to glow on the thin squareness in front of her armchair. Rory decided that if Miss Patty were to decorate a hospital, she was dancing in the woman's interior design daydreams. And, in a rare sentiment, she also decided that she wouldn't mind it if she was. It was...

In this minute trapped in hours and days and weeks, she felt as content as possible sitting in a hospital – nothing could knock her off the high pinnacle of the mountain she had finally stayed atop.

But Jess wasn't there. Jess, while less of a rough hopsack-like person than he used to be, riddled with exterior flaws, was still something abrasive – a raw silk, even save for a few knots and pulls. And he had carried with him on this new bolt of fabric certain attributes that remained solely Jess – lateness being one of them. He meant to be there – but that was just it. He meant it.

Sometimes when Rory locked eyes with him, she saw flecks of a redwood color. Redwoods, she knew, were the most gigantic trees in the country, quite possibly the world- their prized wood and beautifully fragile rings were sought after for a variety of ventures, and they had been surviving on Californian soil for twenty million years. So ostentatious, so magnificent, so cryptic – one could not help but reach out and touch the rusty bark, young and old at one time...touch California...Rory easily cursed herself for thinking something so distrustful. She knew that she could trust Jess to stay here...but sometimes, she saw the redwood lights, a mile away in his eyes, and thought they were burning to brightly. That he might want to see them again.

He never showed up for her appointment, which made the rich blueness on the walls seem more blue and less jade. Everything seemed colder, the sole exception being the impossible beauty that the underrated hues of black and white on a monitor could bring into her mind. She soaked in the picture quickly at first, then reimbibed, slowly studying every aspect of the screen.

Jane? Eyre, Austen. Baby? Whatever they would choose to call it, it would still be beautiful.

............

After emerging from the surrealness of realizing the reality of this three-feet-above-the-ground feeling swelling inside of herself, Rory slowly opened the apartment door. Jess stood before the microwave, his back facing her like a cooler of dry ice slowly seeping across the floor to remind her of his absence at the hospital.

The microwave matched the whirring of her angry mind. She dropped her purse down deftly, not making a single sound, the ultrasound picture next to it, and crept around the corner to the bedroom, the whirring slowly coming less from the microwave and more from her heart, beating a mile a minute with confusion and upsetting disappointment.

Jess only realized that she had been inches behind him when the door slammed shut.

............

He sat slumped against the floor in the fetal position, a hermit crab still a hermit but no longer in a shell. The microwave had long ago stopped its incessant beeping and the light had gone off, his rice going back to its original chilled state. The top right corner of the photograph bent underneath the heavy, protectively-denying pressure of his thumb, and his eyes swam loftily over the corners, tracing by heart the shape of...baby. Jess wondered what else it would have done to him, had it been in color.

Now he knew all along why black and white had been his favorite colors...why he liked to memorize book pages and paintings. Why he wondered about things that had once seemed unfeasible, improbable.

............

One o'clock was a fiend, attacking Rory's hasty but partially blissful slumber taking place sprawled across the comforter. He knew she was angry, unnerved – he always knew. She knew this because Jess had come to bed with his back facing her, hunched on his side, breathing lightly through his parted mouth and erratically shifting.

She lazily removed her shoes, which seemed a task impossible at the hour, and traipsed lazily, a boat grazing along the ocean floor after dropping an anchor, into the kitchen for water. Her tongue was parched, and she wondered if tongues could shrink from lack of hydration.

There it was, sitting on a stool at the small granite-topped island in the middle of the kitchen. She let a huge breath of air out of her stressed lungs – it felt as if she had been holding that in for hours, through her sleep. Maybe she had. Jess had taken a liking to it, and she didn't understand quite why. Perhaps it was because her mother had made such a fuss over her as a young child; maybe because he didn't have anything to compare it with.

She opened the album carefully, out of a never-ceasing curiosity, running her fingers over her mother's loopy handwriting – RORY. She studied her baby pictures without much interest, having seen them before, and tried to think objectively, playing a subconscious game – "If I didn't know this was me, would I be able to tell?"

Reaching the end of the album, she remembered that there was an empty page that had never been filled, and made a mental note to find some more pictures to fill it with. She flipped faster, to count how many vacant spots there were – and suddenly no longer needed water. Her quest for hydration had been detoured, then had come to a screeching halt.

In the first empty slot was the black-and-white photograph from the doctor's office, one corner slightly crooked, but there. She was overwhelmed by for the millionth time that day – and caught sight of a small torn piece of lined yellow paper in the caption slot beneath the photo. It was unmistakably Jess' handwritng, in uneven capitals. It was as if he had taken her heart and squeezed it, relieving the overload and making more room for the next thousand emotions he would pour back in.

JANE, he wrote.

............

Rory returned to the room in a daze – and jumped. Jess sat upright in bed, and had been watching the door like a time-ticking bomb. And there she appeared. He knew she had seen it. He stuck the key in and locked their eyes, a death stare with too much life to die.

Rory saw beautiful shades – cornfields and sunset and redwood. The redwood was still there, but dull, matte, painted on; only a memory and no longer a desire. The most confident color shone the brightest, boring through her pupils...Rory saw the reflection of her dark brown hair in them, encompassing the pallet of earthy paints. And a glint of blue – deep, rich, real blue. Her blue.

She knew she had never doubted him at all. It had just taken her awhile to remember that.

"I like Jane," he whispered. She liked his rough silk whispering.

"Austen, not Eyre," she enunciated. Her knees melted. "Austen."

A/N: The quote "to be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love" is from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. References to song lyrics were from "Sweet Child O'Mine" by Guns and Roses. Thanks for reading! Review, because...it's a circle of karma and love!


	14. Warm Steel Snow

A/N: Wow. I almost forgot what this story was about. Sorry for not updating sooner, but I've been hit with an insane and cruel barrage of School, Homework, Computer Virus, Loss of Harddrive, and Writer's Block. (Also perhaps a small bit of procrastination ;D) Sorry. Be prepared – this is one hell of a long author's note...sorry again. THREE very important things:

I am very aware that this is a chapter set in December with a vague Christmas theme. I'm nuts. I've been lacking in inspiration for a while and the fact that I had no ideas for chapter 14 was eating at me. I have a good idea of where I'm going with this, and had all chapters 'planned' except for this one. I know that a more appropriate setting would be something Novemberish, but bear with me. As a result, it skips ahead more or less 2 months.

This is so fluffy that it's shape and feel reminds me of Snuggle laundry commercials. But I posted you two! Don't worry – next time, the plot will kick into A-Little-Faster-Gear.

A little note: Everyone with sanity should read I Think Of Ice Cubes by Rebekah D.

Thank you Sara dearest for your excellent betaing, as usual. Love you. You kick a lot of ass. ;)

--- Anastasia Athene --- Clear a shelf, because the trophies are piling up. And I'm glad you like Fingering Smoky Thoughts. Totally puts a spark in my day. :blows kisses:

--- someone5 --- thanks for your fantabulous review! Lovetylovetyloved it. And thanks for reading FST.

--- smile1, Rebekah D, Christie, all other reviewers --- I will look to my dear friends Phish. "If I don't get enough of you, I'm a lighter shade of me!" I couldn't have said it better.

Holy Cannoli, I'm exhausted. Chapter 14...

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DECEMBER

Cold was a cowardly fierceness, clawing at the thick car windows but never fully releasing its wrath upon the glass. A firm icing of crystals glittering upon the cake-frosted windshield and tipaclaping down the sides of the car when cleared away, brought Rory's mind back to James Bond. When she closed her eyes, she was sinking in a white porcelain bathtub, drowning in gleaming diamonds of infinite facets. She was counting her own facets. When she reluctantly pulled her heavy pink eyelids open, they met an icebox trapped behind a myriad of starbright rhinestones.

As the windshield wiper scraped dutifully across the glass, a knife to frosting, Jess imagined a shattered window repairing itself, wiping away the scratches. He liked windows that were clean, scratch-free – windows that he could see. He would like to be a scratch-free window. But today, he was Jess the scratch-resistant window. It would have to do.

With the windshield, Rory's classic Connery daydream was scraped away roughly. Alongside the perfect individuality of the windshield frosting went her perception of their car – a cramped ocher Firebird, closing in on its thirteenth birthday. What was underneath the frosting of snowflakes was barely usable and extremely uncomfortable. She squirmed in the ribbed black leather seat, the cushion torn on one corner. A tiny amount of yellow sponge had squeezed itself out into the open frigidness of the front seat and shook with the sporadic streams of air coming from the heating vents.

Jess yanked on the stick shift and pulled brusquely out from the side of the curb. Scattered flurrying downpours had kept most inside on that Saturday morning, a rarity in the city, and he maneuvered the sputtering vehicle through truck-lined asphalt. It was a river of blacktop with an abundance of branches and this morning he could not seem to figure out which led where.

He averted his eyes from the road for a moment, catching a momentary glimpse of Rory. She was slumped lower in the passenger chair, the gray seatbelt clinging tightly over her bright red sweatshirt and molding it over her still tiny frame. Loose, damp tangles of deep brown hair spread themselves in a crescent-moon shape around her rosy neck, lightly curling around at the very ends. A well-worn yellow copy of A Brave New World hung loosely in her hands. The fine art of drinking her in for a split second in the early hours of the morning had been mastered at 7:12:33 on Saturday, December 21. He liked knowing he was an artist. He had always thought so, anyway.

He pulled his eyes back to the bright yellow lines in front of him, putting a shock of color onto the dull black pavement, and studied the next traffic light before the concrete pipe of the Lincoln Tunnel. Jess could feel his lip twitch slightly when he felt her opening her eyes again, reaching back into the world after a trademarked catnap. His peripheral vision caught her arms stretching above her head, her fingers bending ever so slightly, pressing themselves on the soft gray ceiling. A catnap indeed.

"Huxley?" he inquired, not meeting her loose, relaxed gaze as Rory studied him through a lethargic silver fog. She pulled previous thoughts out and aligned them in front of her aqua eyes – Diamonds Are Forever; birthday cake; the long, disgusting face of the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning...in the book. That was what he meant. She grinned knowingly – a daybreak grin that seemed to absorb every color of the brilliantly blazing harvest orange sun. Jess could feel his numb insides release their pent-up freezing-point tension.

"Why do you ask?" She replied, voice husky and low with a slight sandy undertone. He was rubbing off on her every hour.

"Dunno..." he shrugged lifelessly, contorting his mouth into an odd series of knots to control the smile threatening to jump over the pile of cinderblocks. Jess swallowed quickly and removed his hand from the steering wheel to play absentmindedly with Rory's hair. She squirmed like a small infant, rolling her head to one side to trap his hand between her shoulder and cheek for fear of a slightly rich tickling sensation. His palm felt warm satin. His knuckles felt warm satin. He studied each molecule in isolation, without attempting to slide his hand out. With her butter shoulders, he could do so – but stayed anyway.

"Jess, keep your hands on the steering wheel," she whispered, her hot cinnamon breath setting a match to his hand. Heat radiating from her body, her skin, her presence...it was burning him. He slipped his hand out and it came from between her satin easily. She hugged her arms over her chest and hunched over, a tulip still asleep after a night closed to the daylight. "Please, Jess," she complained as his fingers lingered on her shoulder. The sweatshirt was yanked to one side, running up the right side of her neck and allowing for her shoulder to emit massive waves of sonorous warmth.

He trailed his finger up her shoulder to her chin, then down her neck. His finger had wheels, but they were rusty and had to move slow, protracted in motion. Over the round, full curve of her chest, it paused at the center of her stomach (Bigger? No. Yes. He grinned inside), pressing the thick cotton against it, outlining her hips. He spread his hand in an arc shape, flattening his palm against her for a moment...but not long enough. Rory sighed deeply as he traced an ongoing stripe between her hipbones, then pulled away as asked.

"Answer the question," he murmured, clearing his throat as though his fingers had stayed firmly clasped around the steering wheel for that last seven minutes of precious morning time.

"I like this book," she stated simply, turning her thumb to see which page she had stopped at. Sixteen.

"It's that...you know...holiday." He cleared his throat. "Christmas. And you're...you know, we're...why aren't you reading Dickens or somethin'?" He straightened the sinuous streak he was weaving through the now kinetic air. "Huxley wrote of a world where people are manufactured; where procreation has been replaced by a microscope and IVF without the I and the V. Where everything moral is impossible to comprehend...a seemingly utopian society with a really twisted way of conceiving."

Rory studied his face for briefly, fluidly tracing the shape of his eyes. This was the Jess she loved the best – the Jess who opened up his cinderblock wall long enough to tell her his opinion on satirical novels. He was open Jess. Open mouth, open discussion. An open black hole that she sometimes wished she could pull him through to the other side in. But Jess had a gravitational force stronger than any hole. So she took what she could get.

"But much like ours, ours as individual people making choices," she snapped back(fueling her fire), "Brave New World had good intentions. We may not be always deciding the right things to better our lives, but our instincts are to blame. Ironically, it's an uplifting book by comparison...except that John ends up killing himself." She let out a whistle of air, a sign of defeat. He was always at the point before she was...another thing she liked about him. She had to chase him, or she wouldn't know the answers to anything at all.

Jess removed a cinderblock at a stop sign and sat on top of it.

SAME DAY; STARS HOLLOW 5:00 PM

Uneventful returns to Stars Hollow were believed to be criminal local offenses; but today, Jess thanked whatever power that there was for their mostly unpublicized drive through the quaint town. Rory decided miracles did exist when not a head in the center gazebo turned to the sound of the sputtering Firebird and the eternal exhalation of the exhaust pipe.

They pulled into the Gilmore driveway to see Lorelai, bundled in an emerald-green knit shawl that was very large for her size, rocking back and forth on the white wooden bench swing with an ironstone china mug. Rory was still emanating rich circular yellowness and the outside was a bitter, icy desert. Jess was not sure if his wife's childhood home was cold or warm. To him, it was always somewhere in between. He was always in between.

Rory made a deep growl in the depths of her throat, her neck moving as the sound resonated through her lips. She unbuckled her seatbelt and let it slip back, releasing her. Opening her eyes and adjusting them to the glacial temperatures of a car with no heat, she analyzed Lorelai's position and let free an excited yelp.

Jess pulled her paperback out of the glove compartment and thumbed through it, his index finger rippling like pebbles on brook water as the yellowed sheets sifted underneath his skin. He turned to watch Rory walking, his half-asleep tulip, up towards the front porch. Lorelai was waving excitedly, outstretched hand flapping like a sail in sea wind.

He figured that Rory was his Linda in every way and closed the book around his thumb, the argument concluded only to himself now.

"Caroline." Rory smiled, her lips only a little dry and wind worn. She stood on the step before the porch, bouncing on her heels and running her long, limber dancing fingers over the pilly red fuzz on her sweatshirt.

"Jenny." Lorelai balanced her mug on the banister and wrapped Rory in a hug – a tight December hug that twisted them together safely like a no-salt pretzel. Rory sniffed in the stinging air, and she remembered lots of hugs.

Jess managed to pull himself out of the car, the door creaking shut behind him and making a noise that a tinfoil car would make. Popping open the brown tinfoil trunk, he carefully lifted two duffel bags over his shoulders. Looking up as he locked the Firebird, all he saw were miles and miles of endless blue sky. The richest blue – like seven oceans in tandem, one ceaseless ream of sea silk. His heart reminded him a little of why he truly liked Stars Hollow. Only here would he see Rory's eyes in the sky for Christmas.

Rory's favorite part about the holidays was the garnet blown glass bowl full of honey almonds placed appropriately on the end-table next to the living room couch. Lorelai had the most endearing habit of turning the couch to face the fireplace in the winter, and blue firefly bursts erupting into white smoke shadows on antique brick always made her feel warm inside. Curled like a callow five-year-old on the worn, broken-in sofa, Lorelai's dark green shawl wrapped around her shoulders, Rory traced the uneven patterns of the garnet glass bowl with the tips of her fingers, a honey almond sleeping in her cheek and letting her taste rosy red and gold.

It was as though she had crossed ten mountains and eons of deserts to when she was five years old, and she did not have to close her eyes but for the memory of a plum slipcover over the sofa cushions. Everything had stayed unchanged – the beautiful garnet glass bowl, the hills of honey almonds, the yellow fireworks nestled safely in a mound of gray wooden logs, telling stories and showing dancing nutcracker ballerinas on the wall.

She felt five. She remembered five years old as her favorite year – lots of her mother's pirate jokes, and a strange love for yellow rice with blue food coloring in it, and hanging raspberry candy canes on a tree, and being a blissful, warm, safe, fuzzy five-year-old wrapped in her mother's shawl on the plum slipcover, writing raw poems in her mind of ballerinas and snowmen and fairies while she rolled honey almonds around her mouth.

And somehow she knew a better year would come. A better year five years from now when she would not be the only person feeling five, when she would have to share the green afghan and the garnet bowl of almonds and all of the nightdreams that would come from the dancing fireplace.

Rory thought she might like sharing. Sugar was not exactly beneficial to teeth, and body heat is always warmer than stiff old wool.

Warm feelings.

It was early night when Jess went back in. He had ventured into the biting ten o'clock air soon after Lorelai had relented in her time-transcending entertainment strategies and galloped in a groggy state up the stairs to phone the diner. Thin flutes of snow whistled nothing, whispering conspiratorially as they cleaned the air of itself, leaving nothing but the oboe of winds and the hollow shells of snowflake flautists. It was impossible to distinguish the world on which he stood from the sky. All was black wine, and nothing could separate the starbrights from the snow crystals. The four yards between the feather-warm sensation of the house and the frame that was his automobile was a midnight desert.

He closed his eyes and let himself drop, muscles resting. Jess' body landed with a dry, subdued thunup onto a mound of soft, fresh flurryfall. It hurt at first, and he could have sworn that he felt a purple bruise forming on his hip, but he slid onto his back and stuck his hands out in the air, becoming a large X in the snow.

Find me. (200 paces to the left) Find me.

No sound. Water flowed past his ears but there was none, just snow. He felt, heard, smelled seven seasons before – the same quiet nothingness. The same noise that was not there, that was only heard by him because he wanted to, lingered, and like melting icicles, dripped onto his face. He felt snowflakes nipping on his eyebrows and rolling down his face. His ears were numb and he could hear better because of it. Seven seasons, winters ago – the first time he did this because he wanted her.

Air is a perfect kind of wave that hits the flesh of the ear with such a force that in seconds it is gone, and all that is left is the shadow of something you never found.

Jess thought. He got colder and the snow began to spiral like hot coils and he thought more. He tried to think about the future. He didn't like the future very much because it was something he didn't know. But out here, he decided to give it a chance. And he saw faces. All different kinds with different hair and eyes and some with little black glasses and some with freckles and some that were smiling and some that were not. Some he had remembered from the past and was using as a reference; others, he was creating in those minutes, making a dream for himself so that five years later, he would not be surprised.

He thought about Rory, bundled in her mother's blanket on the couch and writing novels in the solitude of her heart, an Eskimo. He thought about little Eskimo children sitting with Rory under her blanket and he thought about Rory and a little Eskimo child telling fireplace stories. He cursed himself for resorting to schmaltz and sap at twelve o'clock at night on December twenty-second.

He thought about the stack of books at home, welcome family always boarding in that office room, and their musty October smell and how he thought Rory would like it if she was not the only one who would sit in the corner of the room at dusk, lilac luminescence lilting languidly through the window, holding an old, damp book to her face and breathing.

The one she breathed in the most was Oliver Twist. It was a given, and her favorite, if only for the sheer sentiment it brought with it. Modern scales weighed it at 18.9 ounces, but it weighed so much more in actuality. He remembered the very first pages of the beloved book, the ink of his black ballpoint pen in the margins turning grayer with each year.

"_And Oliver gave this first proof of the free and proper action of his lungs, the patchwork coverlet which was carefully flung over the iron bedstead rustling."_

And Jane gave this first proof of the free and proper action of her lungs, the patchwork coverlet which was carefully flung over the iron bedstead rustling.

"Rory."

She rolled onto her side, outlines of hearth fireflies dancing on her claret temples and berry cheeks. He crept closer to the sofa, and noticing her fingers wrapped around the rim of the garnet bowl, slowly pried them off and put the bowl on the table with a clanking, glass-to-glass chink. Rory stretched her arm subconsciously, balling her fingers into a tight fist. She hummed an A-minor to herself in the shape of a deep sigh, her body straightening itself and the thick green blanket bunching around her hipbones, outlining her stomach. He had noticed before and a quick remembrance of June made him think that there were only six months. As quickly as she had stretched, she curled up and lapsed back into silence. He ran a sly thumb down her neck and along her shoulder. Zipper...

Her soft pillow lips became a curling ellipse, white in the burn of the fireplace. "Hmm, Jess," she murmured. His face stayed solemn and rigid and when her eyes flickered open, frosted with thoughts of snow and Eskimos in fur hoods, they were paler but not less ardent. She saw him standing in front of her, and she attempted to sit up, propping her head on her elbow which was effectively propped on a red cushion. He jerked his head slowly in the direction of the front door.

"You don't look like Jenny," he said brusquely, watching as she gathered the shawl around her shoulders and wrapped the ends into an awkward bow at the neck. She put the hood of the sweater over her head, concealing the flaxen wisps of her fleecy brown curls in red, and decisively yanked on the drawstrings. He thought that she looked like a cross between Yente and...an Eskimo.

"I thought you said you didn't read that book," she countered drowsily. He shoved his fingers into his pockets, palms reddening.

"I didn't." He smirked and turned towards the door. She slipped her feet back into the red canvas Chuck Taylors and traipsed after him. Rory couldn't help but think that maybe he liked being a Cerberus to her, because it didn't mean having to sacrifice his image for the sake of her happiness.

She liked better the thought that he kept his leather-jacket image because he knew she wouldn't have him any other way.

Outside, the flutes of snowflakes still drifted down from the sky and spoke in hushed tones and tongues. Rory let her feet fall over the plank front steps and into the new inches of snow, and immediately scolded herself for wearing canvas in mounds of frozen water. Jess was already standing in the dead center of the front yard, staring into space. At any other time of day, it would be light enough to see the outlines of the houses, but twelve thirty was a wild blindness. It was now when Jess thought he could see the best because he didn't have to take anything for its literal worth.

Except for when Rory appeared in front of him, a plastic pocket flashlight shining concentrated on the spot right above his nose and between his eyes. He closed one eye, glaring at her with the other.

"You could blind a person like that, you know," he snapped grumpily, in a tone so monotonous and detached that she could picture his voice being the same pitch in the closets of her mind at age eighteen.

"Would it make a difference out here?" she retorted, her voice less dull and more excitable, pleased that she had come up with something to say.

"About a billion differences," he shot back, though, voice cool and low and rigorous to the very letter. She smiled, pulling air through her teeth and making the roof of her mouth ache a little bit, knowing what he meant.

"What are you thinking about?" Her voice still sent shivers down his spine. Jess didn't answer, but he moved his eyes to hers and kept the gaze tight and solid, steel gossamer, for what seemed like many more winters.

"Are you counting?" She knew he wouldn't answer, so she continued to whisper. Rory thought that maybe she was whispering because she didn't want to disturb the unheard music that the snow was making. "I am. Six months." His eyebrow twitched a little.

Rory knew for certain, more than anything, that he was holding a smile in. At least he was smiling.

Snow flautists and the outline of his face and her nimble fingers holding a plastic pocket flashlight and the darker hue that wet Converse shoes seemed to take when immersed in snow. All invisible, and only four of a billion differences. She leaned her head on his shoulder and he could feel her snow-flecked hair dampening the black cotton of his shirt just a little bit.

"This was a nice present," she whispered. She was practicing to be a snow flautist. He shifted his feet in the snow and pulled a hand from his pocket to play with the tendrils of hair splayed over his shoulder and down around his torso.

"Huh," he replied, hardly a flute-like sound. Far from it. It was scratchy and rough and hollow and pure Jess. She liked that he stayed constant.

"Merry Christmas, Jess," she whispered back. She knew it would get to him. She would bet a lot of things on it.

His whole self had been warped, standing there in the cold quiet, back to rebellious eighteen, seven seasons ago, but the constancy was that he was still not one for the spoken word. It was terse but he meant it. "'Christmas, Rory," he stated evenly.

She turned and kissed him bluntly on the lips, and discovered a very nice surprise – that here in the cold, his lips stayed warm and inviting even when his being screamed for solitude and a respected sharing of his world. They were gentle, even when the rest of him was calloused, and when she pulled away he stared back at her, drunkenly happy but in awe that she had been his for seven seasons.

The next one was warm and slow and cavernous, and Rory's feet weren't nearly as cold and Jess wasn't nearly as solitary. She put her hand on the nape of his neck and he felt her fingers on the small curls of dark hair there, and his fingers began to wheel themselves, in turn, over her shoulders and down her arms, and around her stomach (brief pause) and then on her hips to stay.

Seven seasons is a long time, and people can still leave and not come back but they haven't nearly as many real reasons to.

So since seven seasons has warmed them up (only slightly) to the notions of Eskimos and numbing snowfalls and those literate girls in the green shawls, and the thought that Jane Austen not only wrote well but had a nice name, they figure that leaving all of those warmed-up notions would be a waste of time.

Rory was happy that she was sharing the first snowfall with Jess that year.

A/N: I PROMISE that the chapters following this will be MUCH more EVENTFUL. I'm just working my way up to them. They'll be so much better than this plotless...stuff. Stay tuned! ;) Please review.


	15. The Third By Thirty Nine Days

A/N: Aww, I kept my promise. Lost some sleep, but I kept my promise. Thank you Sara for your speed-of-light betaing. Thanks to everybody who reviewed last chapter too. Lipton Lee and Anastasia Athene, especially – I admire both your writing and your thoughtfulness. ;)

This is really short, I know. The next chapter (which will be gigantic because I have it all planned out) will be up _hopefully_ by next week sometime.

--------

Boy!

It was a boy. Jess stayed silent and Rory bought blue things. Jess thought that he had known all along; her eyes were so vibrant with sapphire resolve and said orbs were so electrical that he felt compelled to buy a baseball glove.

It wouldn't have mattered to him either way – he was simply content now. But blue was nicer than pink, and Rory could not keep herself from envisioning her son with a flood of dark curls and nimble fingers and a tiny, newborn aura radiating Jess.

Now knowing the truth, neither of them would have had it any other way.

--------

He kissed her, and those(lips)...

They were warm water; in a mere instant, she found herself absorbed into a motif of a scalding shower spray and a steamed mirror. And they tasted like warm water too; like boiling water. Like boiling water and stale cobalt smoke, and like the heavy, snapping air before a downpour (stinging but balmy, and unlike anything else she had ever savored or felt). She remembered that the first time she tasted them, they were so intensely sooty that she could almost sense sparks in between them; as though his cigarette was still clenched between his teeth. Sometimes they tasted like soap, other times like pine and the lingering mustiness of alcohol. She remembered only one thing from a particular September – the taste of butterscotch and real scotch and smoldering Marlboros. Memories allowed her to beam against the soft, light brown solidness that was his _lips._

He smirked too. Because it was May and she had bought green linen bedsheets and it was one of few moments when the counting was forgotten.

It seemed as though the entire winter season had passed without him knowing it, keeping the months in a surreptitious secret of slyness and momentum. It had flown by, wings fluttering swiftly and ladling up the mounds of flurry and frigid, stale air and that atmosphere of disdain and ineptness that came with January. And February had glided into New York City, encompassing the buildings and endless concrete in a dome of opaline gauze (many days had been spent channeling Jon Lovitz and sitting cross-legged on the couch, re-reading The Lord God Made Them All). March had come in like a lion and stayed that way, a ferociously weeping, marshmallow storm that permeated every centimeter of sidewalk and rung like iron churchbells up through his feet, his knees, his legs.

April was a ballerina; that was what Rory had said. It made a roundabout pirouette into spring and continued to leap across the city until droplets of hoary rain began to patter down from the looming, broad masses of clouds. For weeks there was no sky, only an eternal horizon of downy steel wool and the cavernous echo of a billion waterchildren bouncing off of the road and painting the windows with glassy dew.

And now, it was glorious May. The ground was still damp but the iron churchbells ringing through his body as he walked down the street were growing weaker, and that red maple on the corner was slowly shedding its solstice cocoon of ice and nudity. Now, fully clothed in a fireflash of syrupy burgundy leaves, he thought of how different the red maple would be in fall, and how different he would be. Rory would be. They would be. Three people would be.

And here he was, under mossy green linen sheets, the curtains hiding the long, dewy window and his eyes blanketed in the darkness of seven o'clock in the morning. Her leaf feet tangled with his, recreating sadder days, and he lay his swamp of dark hair to her chest and breathed in white tea and May and starchy linen and the atmospheric imprint of leather on his own arms.

She felt his lips on her sternum and she could still taste him. He flavored her.

--------

It was a different world, that room. Rory stood in the exact center (or at least, what she thought might be the exact center). Gone was the dream of a library, of a mouse-hole apartment secluded from the rest of the earth, of Saturday nights spent in a filmy brown cotton bedsheet cocoon in the corner of the bedroom; Saturday nights on the floor in the right corner of the bedroom next to the window, with Neruda and dark russet hair like Montresor's cape, and tasting (she calalilies and memories, and belief in heaven; he dying embers and must and Philip Pirrip).

There were new dreams. He never had many dreams really – he had one dream, and that was Rory. She preferred to use the term ambitions. Her ambition was still to spend a night in the corner of the bedroom in a stiff brown cotton sheet, with Neruda and his hair like the Everglades and tasting. But it was also to have a room that matched her eyes (when they were closed) and to have a four-pane window that shed ladybug light from the streetlamps down into a haven cobweb over a cradle. And to have a blue fleecy blanket, and to line shelves upon shelves with books.

So there was a cradle in the room, the one with the exact center, now. Sometimes, in the morning, she would absentmindedly come in and peer inside of the bassinet and Jess would smirk in the doorway because he knew there was nothing there. She blamed time. He blamed hope.

Jess thought that Rory looked like a sunbeam in May. She was a shaft of clearwater daybreak luminosity, his sunup, a cattail swaying in the Hell's Kitchen wind. At night, she was his twilight, a full moon, a lavender stardust bolt of ethereal euphoria and pleasurable calamity. He was silent most of the time now, but he kept the picture album in the bookshelf and he found himself growing fonder of black-and-white and halos.

Rory liked to sit with her head against the headboard, linen in a lake around her feet, as he stood, her sturdy, shadowy redwood tree, alphabetizing novels. She liked that he was reading James Herriot now. She didn't think he ever would have bothered if it hadn't been for the present day.

He knows that he never would have bothered if it hadn't been for Rory and picnic baskets and depleted insensitivity and photographs.

--------

May wasn't, isn't, and never will be June.

May sixth is not June fifteenth.

And it is the day after he finished alphabetizing books, and he has been reading All Things Wise And Wonderful. And it makes him remember his eighth birthday. But that doesn't matter, because he had stopped on page 75 (Huh.) and she was wailing, crying in the other room. Thump, he heard. Cliché, he thought (of the thump). He couldn't breathe and it took them what seemed like seven more seasons to leave.

He couldn't help but think, airways constricted and body mechanical, that he shouldn't have to do this for another month. In another month, he would have had a small space to breathe and his motions might be more fluid.

But Rory was in tears and he couldn't breathe.

And May sixth is not June fifteenth.

"Only perhaps, by right divine of song

It may to me belong;

Only because the spreading chestnut tree

Of old was sung by me...

Only your love and your remembrance would

Give life to this dead wood

And make these branches, leafless now so long

Blossom again in song." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

**A/N:** Okay, so it was short. I don't think it was that good, but Sara seems to think it's fine and I trust her. Anyway, please review. This time, it's a dollar for your thoughts! How can you beat that in this day and age?

The quote is from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "From My Arm-Chair." It's beautiful, and I recommend reading it. I hope to have the next chapter up within the next week. No promises, but I'm working on it. –molly-


	16. Dynamic Heartbreak

A/N: So, I was reading my author's note from the previous chapter and it said that this one would be up in about a week…haha. Sorry for the really, really, really long wait. Um…to everyone who reviewed – it blows me away that you're **that** interested in this. It makes my day when I get reviews and emails that people send, and…wow.

Thank you, Sara, for waiting for SO. LONG.

_Italics_ obviously indicate flashbacks.

So here's Chapter 16.

…………

Eight hours after it happened, the gray masses of cloud hanging low in the sky broke apart and water began pelting against the windowpanes. Blue bullets exploded and streaked down the glass, blurring the black sky.

He was slumped low in the chair, knees bent and brow furrowed and eyelids heavy, breathing thick. Jess wasn't sure what had awoken him, but a startling sense of numb cold penetrated his skin and his eyes began to open without warning. It was four in the morning. His legs had fallen asleep and his ears stung from the unbroken pattering of the rain. Everything was a shadow; all he could see were shades of gray and a fuzzy flourescent light at the top of the bed.

So very loud (the rain).

It took two or three tries to get up from the chair, and the frozen feeling in his feet and legs remained. His fingers were sore and he reached for the mint pinstriped curtain hanging from the ceiling. Holding it tightly, cotton clenched in his fist, Jess ran his other hand through his hair and blinked rapidly. Everything was blurry and wet and fading away. It was fading away.

Legs numb, arms cold, face warm, hands shaking. Head aching. Rain loud, wet, very loud. Aching loudly.

His neck cracked. He turned a little, gaining his footing slowly as the flow of blood to his feet brought the feeling back to his limbs. And there she was. He could see better now, and there she was. The bed was small, and she lay, a forlorn paper doll, pale and fragile on the mattress. The thin cotton sheet fell around her waist, her arms limp. He watched her chest rise and fall fitfully, her lips open. His Rory was asleep and she couldn't feel how much the rain was hurting his eardrums.

Next to her bed, the bassinette was empty.

Where was he? He wasn't here. Where was he?

Turning slowly, Jess let go of the curtain and made his way slowly through the dark, raw room, falling noiselessly against the door and curling his hand around the doorknob. He twisted and opened.

…………

Everything in the hallway was so very white again – bright, and noisy, and cheerfully painful. The halls were white, and the sheets were white, and the hospital gowns were white with tiny mint dots on them. Jess made his way down the hall slowly, retracing footsteps that he had remembered from almost a whole day ago. There weren't many people out in the hallways at four o'clock and everything was still, hanging in the air.

When he saw the window, he blinked his eyes rapidly. There they all were.

Jess pressed his face against the glass. They were all there, bassinettes lined up in alphabetical order, filled with tiny, wriggling creatures, new and fresh and pink. Their round flower mouths twisted and yawned, their arms stretched lazily above their heads, their eyes followed his as he scanned over them.

ABCDEFG.

He paused once or twice, seeing a little head of dark curls or two sleepy blue eyes. He had read somewhere that newborns could only see about a half of a foot in front of them, and it bothered him. He thought his son should be able to see him, at least. He scanned quicker, warm bundles writhing underneath his gaze.

HIJKLM.

It was late. He was tired. He was suffering a mental lapse. He was having a James Thurber Fan moment. He started back at A, reading each little yellow card on each little bassinette. When he got to the M babies, he squinted, read each card twice, rubbed his eyes.

He wasn't here either. Where _was_ he? He wasn't here.

He could only see straight ahead. And then he was turning, walking through the glass door into the nursery. He couldn't hear or feel or see. Everything was in shades of gray; shades of gray with silvery edges and his stomach was contorting itself into irreversible box knots.

Legs shaking, arms shaking, face hot, eyes clouded, hands in pockets. Noise so painful and ears so deaf that he wasn't sure if he was hearing it.

A nurse in powder blue came out from behind a door and his hands began shaking inside of his pockets.

"I'm sorry, sir, but you can't be in here," she said.

Noise was bouncing off of him like sharp, stinging rubber bands and he thought his arms are getting red. (So loud.)

"Where…is he?" Jess' mouth was cotton-dry, and his heart was beginning to hurt.

"Where is who, sir? You can't be in here."

Rubber bands pelted his chest. There were no windows inside of the nursery, but he could still hear the rain, so far away, growing heavier and faster and louder. It was louder than his heartbeat, or the way he swallowed, or the rasping noise in the back of his throat.

"My…kid, my son…where is he? He isn't here, the thing in the room is empty…he's gone, he's…" Jess trailed off, squeezing his eyes shut. His fingers curled around the material of the inside of his pockets.

"Are you a Mr. Mariano, by any chance?" asked the nurse, the lines around her eyes suddenly becoming less crinkled.

That rubber band hurt most of all, and left his ribcage bruised on both sides.

He nodded.

"Mr. Mariano, do you remember what happened this afternoon? Come with me, please." The nurse put a hand on his forearm and he was feeling fire, fire from when he burned his arm on the kitchen stove when he was five years old. She led him outside of the nursery, closed the door, loosened her grip on his arm. It still burned.

"Mr. Mariano, can you remember what happened to you this afternoon?"

Everything hurt in a drowsy way…the delivery was frozen, the actual attack sharp and crisp and insufferably raw.

"My…I brought Rory here…I…she had…the baby, we had a kid…it was a boy, but we already, already knew that…it was late…I…" Everything was blank where it hurt the most. Jess rubbed a hand up and down his chest.

"Mr. Mariano, I'm so very sorry. Your son died just a few moments after he was born. You were there. I'm so sorry." The nurse touched his arm again, and he sensed freezer burn.

His heart slammed up against his ribcage, and then fell to his back, throbbing. The rain was so loud. (Aching loudly.)

…………

"_Rory, I..." he cleared his throat, but the roughness, the throatily velvet sound returned nontheless. "Are we..." the insurgent was stronger than the Jess, and clotheslined the sentence he had known would never make it out. _

But she finished for him, pulling his feelings out onto the floor and spreading them out for her to see. "...trying?" She gently put the album down on an end table, and watched it as though it was going to move.

He didn't move, speak, nod, but she knew. They both knew.

Minutes passed; the room grew darker: less pink now, more golden, more brown.

"Will you dance with me?" It was sudden, but still floaty; still like bubblesoap sound.

He nodded, and approached slowly, as if neither knew the other.

Dancing to silence is the best kind of dance; you create the music, the rhythm, the mood, and everyone, everyplace, everything else is your dance partner, moving with you, breathing with you, feeling how you feel.

"Yes," he whispered in her ear.

…………

He stood outside in the rain. It was the kind of hurt that didn't make itself known until it had become immersed in his bones, absorbed by his heart. It was cold for May; the rain made the dead air seem icier, unfeeling. It was five o'clock in the morning and the pavillion was abandoned. So he stood, and let the wet cloudburst soak into his shirt, drench his face, flatten his hair, and make more noise than his heartbeat.

The nurse's arm had burned against his skin and he had stood there for a mere second before turning and walking towards the elevator. The elevator took much too long so he used the stairs instead. And he had thrown his body through the door, and slowed to a stand-still on the curb, eyes fogging up again and heart beating miles every second, sinking down around his feet.

Their kid didn't even have a name.

The thought of missing something he had never really had, something so far from his reach, something he would never be able to fully grasp, to hold onto, melted his insides. His stomach was sore, and something inside of his chest twinged painfully. Jess thought fleetingly of the baseball glove he had never purchased.

And he also thought of the very idea that he would never be able to say "My son" again.

The rain was softer now, and he could hear the steady, hollow thumping of his heart against his ribs. It was a frightening sound because it made him think of heartache.

It was letting him know that heartache was real, and that he was feeling it now.

He would never be able to say "My son" again.

It was an achingly soft silence when he began to blink away the tears.

…………

"_Hey," she whispered huskily, pulling herself up on the balls of her feet, then down onto her heels again. Barefoot...Jess traced a slight navy vein down her ankle, across the bridge of her foot, and up to her round, milky white toes._

"_Jess, um," she began, pulling in air. He looked up at her, and noticed a small glass droplet fly from her eyelash to the floor._

_And he knew that they both knew it. That the harrowing ride down the mountain of hope had fallen to the floor inside of the glassy tear just shed._

_She held out her arm, in her hand a plastic stick, her eyes damp and squeezed shut but her mouth a bright, breathtaking geranium smile again._

_Pink...not blue._

_...pink._

…………

When he finally came back inside, it was only after the rain had stopped and his heart was so loud and so full, his throat so choked and rough, that he needed to hear something else. This time, Jess took the elevator; his legs felt bruised and he needed something to lean against, something to let him pretend that he could stand by himself. It was what he had always done, anyway. Pretend that he could stand by himself.

He should have expected him to be there, sitting on a waiting room sofa, reading something with pure disinterest, worry lines etched on his face, one arm bent stiffly as he scratched his neck.

"Luke." It was soft, but still rough and bumpy and thick from the wet air outside. His uncle looked up, slowly closing the magazine, lowering his arm, clearing his throat.

"Hey, uh, Jess…I'm…I'm sorry…" The words trailed off, and he stood up.

Jess simply stared, unmenacingly, shuffling his left foot every once every few seconds to reassure himself that he could stay balanced, stay calm, stay normal, stay okay.

After all, it wouldn't be that hard to pretend right now. Later, if it rained again, he could stand outside and let himself hurt a little more, let it sink farther inside of himself, let the nonexistent memories linger.

"Is Lorelai here?" Jess asked.

"Oh, uh, yeah. Rory, she, uh, she woke up about an hour ago. She's with her." Luke was nervous, still trying to figure out how he should be reacting. It bounced off of Jess, but it didn't hurt as much, just kept the other bruises and scratches from swelling, his heart from near rupturing into small pieces of rain.

"Thanks." And he left. Luke sat, still nervous. It wasn't like he didn't have any bruises at all.

Jess slowly opened the door. It was still dark in Rory's room, but he could tell she was awake. His ears were becoming clearer and he could hear Lorelai whispering to Rory in a soft, feathery tone, although it seemed as though she was miles away. He stepped closer, mindful of his shaking feet, grabbing at the curtain again.

Lorelai looked up, still squeezing her daughter's hand. "Oh, Jess," she breathed, eyes tired, gleaming wet like rainwater.

He just stared.

Rory's eyes were heavy, her appearance somnolent, her face streaked with tears. She focused her gaze on her husband for mere seconds before water began to stream limitlessly down her face again, silent and distressed. Lorelai smoothed a damp lock of hair back from Rory 's face, tucking it behind her ear, and stood up slowly. Jess could see some bruises on her, too.

"I'm going to let you be alone for awhile," she said to nobody in particular. Then she left.

Rory continued looking at the wall, eyes welling up and stinging, face a sickly pink. Jess slowly sat on the bed next to her, the mattress creaking and Rory whimpering.

He had never seen his Rory's eyes so void of brilliant blue, of color, of cornflower. Her irises were nearly gray, even in the dark of early morning, and her pupils small.

After lying for a minute's worth of hours, he felt her monochrome gaze fall distressingly upon his face.

"Jess," She pleaded. Tears spilled from her inky black eyelashes, warming her cheeks and stinging his face as he held her against his body. "Jess, he's gone and I didn't even know it till now…"

"Rory, I…" he struggled with words, trying to remember all of the things he had wanted to tell her. So many, and not one came to his mind. "I'm sorry, Rory."

She pulled away a little, ramblingly wetly. "I wanted it so, so badly…I wanted so badly for it to be a girl…and I cared too much about if it was…if it was a girl or not, but then it was a boy…and…and then I started to be happy about it being a boy, too…and…I cared too much about stupid things like it being a girl…and now…now he's…now he's gone," Rory sobbed.

Jess pulled Rory to himself again, this time so very close that she could feel his heart thumping desperately, breaking itself, next to hers, which was struggling to keep itself from doing the same. The feel of a breaking heart, aching painfully as it withered like a flower against April rain, elicited a pitchy cry from Rory's throat.

"Jane was such a pretty name," she sobbed into Jess' shirt.

He remembered what he had wanted to say, listening intently to Rory's pained warble; a wounded bird she was. Letting the loud, thumping ache dig deeper into his chest.

"I never bought a baseball glove."

Rory sobbed harder. Her heart was breaking alongside of his too, now.

…………

_It was a different world, that room. Rory stood in the exact center (or at least, what she thought might be the exact center). Gone was the dream of a library, of a mouse-hole apartment secluded from the rest of the earth, of Saturday nights spent in a filmy brown cotton bedsheet cocoon in the corner of the bedroom; Saturday nights on the floor in the right corner of the bedroom next to the window, with Neruda and dark russet hair like Montresor's cape, and tasting (she calalilies and memories, and belief in heaven; he dying embers and must and Philip Pirrip)._

_There were new dreams. He never had many dreams really – he had one dream, and that was Rory. She preferred to use the term ambitions. Her ambition was still to spend a night in the corner of the bedroom in a stiff brown cotton sheet, with Neruda and his hair like the Everglades and tasting. But it was also to have a room that matched her eyes (when they were closed) and to have a four-pane window that shed ladybug light from the streetlamps down into a haven cobweb over a cradle. And to have a blue fleecy blanket, and to line shelves upon shelves with books._

_So there was a cradle in the room, the one with the exact center, now. Sometimes, in the morning, she would absentmindedly come in and peer inside of the bassinette and Jess would smirk in the doorway because he knew there was nothing there. She blamed time. He blamed hope._

…………

The entire morning was blurry, nonexistent. Light broke through the windows, stained from the dried-up showers, but Rory wanted the curtains closed. He closed them.

At ten o'clock, Lorelai knocked softly on the door and came in. Rory, sorrow visible in all of her features, was sitting on the edge of the bed, legs clammy from the starchy white sheets. Jess was seated on the other side, staring out of the window even though all he could see were beams of light through the curtain, his thumb playing absentmindedly with one of Rory's curls.

So far away, yet so close to one another. Static heartbreak, Rory thought. It sounded pretty when she rolled it around inside of her mouth. Static heartbreak – like a blossom, or a romantic novel, or a light feeling.

Looks and sounds and feelings are deceiving, though.

"Hi, Rory." Her mother's voice was gentle, floaty. Static and far away. (Achingly soft.)

"Hi," she murmured back, not looking up. Jess slowly let the lone brunette curl slip from around his thumb, one less constant, and leaned over to her neck, then paused. He whispered in her ear.

"I love you." He kissed her throat slowly, holding his lips there, eyes shut. They both knew it wouldn't make her calmer, less shaken. They both knew he wouldn't feel more in control after it. He wondered if his insurgent self would ever have done that – tried to fix himself using something that wouldn't work.

And then Jess left the room.

Lorelai sat slowly next to Rory, hesitantly slinging an arm over her daughter's shoulders. Never had she felt so isolated, so detached from her baby. Ever.

"Rory, honey, I love you. I wish I could…I wish I could fix this for you," she said. It hung in the air. Rory gulped, letting her mother's static heartbreak seep into her chest. It wasn't fair. Everybody was dumping their bruises onto her and it hurt too much. Last night, she had watched as Luke dumped his onto Jess. And it was excruciating.

"Mommy." She buried her face into Lorelai's neck, bawling. The bruises were so raw and purple and she thought they would never leave. Her body twisted.

…………

Neither of them had thought it would get any worse.

At three in the afternoon, Luke and Lorelai came to say goodbye and tell them that they would be back the next morning. At three thirty, a nurse came back into the room.

Jess recognized her as the same one that had burned his arm in the hallway, very early in the morning. When he couldn't remember anything the right way. His skin grew hot.

Rory was reading a National Geographic. It was making her feel less nauseous, at least for a little while. "Mr. Mariano, would you mind speaking with me for a moment?" she asked.

"Yeah," he managed to scratch out.

On the other side of the curtain, the nurse whispered softly to him.

Jess felt his heart slam up against his ribcage and stay there, beating quickly. He could see his son before…before everything terrible collided with everything depressing their hearts were broken all over again.

_My son_. _Our son._ _Jess and Rory's son._

…………

Rory's mouth gave forth a muffled cry from behind her hands when the nurse wheeled the little bassinette into the room. It was early evening and the curtains were open now, because it wasn't as bright outside.

Dynamic heartbreak, Rory thought. Powerful and vicious and aggressive and distressing, this new feeling was. It was ugly when she tasted the salt from her tears, licking her dry lips. Somehow she knew that the heartbreak wouldn't be static anymore.

The nurse was gone, and Jess stepped closer. Rory moaned a little, hands still cupping her mouth, eyes squeezed shut, draining the last of the blue from them.

When he saw the baby's face, he lost it. He couldn't stand up by himself anymore and he couldn't keep acting as though he had collected himself ages ago. And his eyes were so wet that as quick as he blinked, they wouldn't dry.

Eons passed and the sun descended below the sky, coloring the view a vibrantly dancing orange, before Jess could bring himself to reach his hands out, to touch what he had lost. Not often is one able to do so – to see what was never fully realized, to touch and hold on to what never would be. The thought of a goodbye that so few often receive calmed his nerves (if only for ashort while)and settled his churning stomach. His heart was still ripping tenderlyin half as he swallowed and opened his eyes again, but something inside of himself cracked cleanly, neatly. A clean cut.

He was a perfect son, held for the only time in Jess' arms. His face was small and round and pale, his eyes gently shut, his every eyelash long and dark. The sight of a shiny dark mop of curls poking out from underneath the tiny blue hat allowed a small, crooked smile to show itself on his father's face.

Jess let out a long, strained sigh, and Rory looked up, her whimpering silenced. There was Jess, standing in the middle of the room, gaze fixed on his son's face, slowly rocking himself back and forth; rocking their son to sleep.

Her heart had mercy on itself for a moment or two and stopped its upset thumping, calming to a slow beat.

"Jess?" she murmured slowly, testing the waters. He looked up, still rocking, not remembering to put up the façade. She liked him better that way, and relaxed somewhat.

"Can I...Jess...please," she choked out, gasping slightly and choking on an air bubble. Dynamic heartbreak's side effects kept her from floating upwards at the paternal picture before her.

Jess blinked, nodding, a downpour of relief washing over himself. This was what she had needed. She had needed to know that her heart was not the only one that was falling apart.

He sat next to her on the bed, straightening his legs. "Wanna hold him?" he muttered, studying her eyes. They hadn't quite lost all of their vibrant color left. It would return eventually, he decided to believe. They'd be blue again.

"No, just…" Jess kissed her cheek. "I like to watch you rocking him to sleep," Rory breathed.

Rory liked very muchwatching Jess rock their son to sleep.

The tiny baby lay still in Jess' arms and didn't move but once underneath Rory's touch. Dynamic heartbreak was too easy to feel.


	17. Chapter 17

Hi.  
So.  
I haven't updated this story in more than two years, and lately I've been wanting to come back to it…however, the reason I dug so deep into the idea and followed this story so far was because I felt like a lot of other people appreciated it too and I got such positive feedback. I really don't want to continue writing it if most readers are indifferent to what happens, even though I really do truly enjoy it. Writing is something I care immensely about so positive feedback is not the only reason I write…however, I'm just wondering if anyone is still interested. I also care a lot about these characters so let me know if you want to see where this story goes and where it takes Rory and Jess (several years down the line, finally).

Thanks :)


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